The true history of a legendary American folk hero
In the 1820s, a fellow named Sam Patch grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, working there (when he wasn't drinking) as a mill hand for one of America's new textile companies. Sam made a name for himself one day by jumping seventy feet into the tumultuous waters below Pawtucket Falls. When in 1827 he repeated the stunt in Paterson, New Jersey, another mill town, an even larger audience gathered to cheer on the daredevil they would call the "Jersey Jumper." Inevitably, he went to Niagara Falls, where in 1829 he jumped not once but twice in front of thousands who had paid for a good view.
The distinguished social historian Paul E. Johnson gives this deceptively simple story all its deserved richness, revealing in its characters and social settings a virtual microcosm of Jacksonian America. He also relates the real jumper to the mythic Sam Patch who turned up as a daring moral hero in the works of Hawthorne and Melville, in London plays and pantomimes, and in the spotlight with Davy Crockett-a Sam Patch who became the namesake of Andrew Jackson's favorite horse.
In his shrewd and powerful analysis, Johnson casts new light on aspects of American society that we may have overlooked or underestimated. This is innovative American history at its best.

Political disagreement is widespread within the communication network of ordinary citizens; furthermore, political diversity within these networks is entirely consistent with a theory of democratic politics built on the importance of individual interdependence. The persistence of political diversity and disagreement does not imply that political interdependence is absent among citizens or that political influence is lacking. The book's analysis makes a number of contributions. The authors demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of political disagreement. They show that communication and influence within dyads is autoregressive - that the consequences of dyadic interactions depend on the distribution of opinions within larger networks of communication. They argue that the autoregressive nature of political influence serves to sustain disagreement within patterns of social interaction, as it restores the broader political relevance of social communication and influence. They eliminate the deterministic implications that have typically been connected to theories of democratic politics based on interdependent citizens.

A quarter-century after its first publication, "A Shopkeeper's Millennium remains a landmark work--brilliant both as a new interpretation of the intimate connections among politics, economy, and religion during the Second Great Awakening, and as a surprising portrait of a rapidly growing frontier city. The religious revival that transformed America in the 1820s, making it the most militantly Protestant nation on earth and spawning reform movements dedicated to temperance and to the abolition of slavery, had an especially powerful effect in Rochester, New York. Paul E. Johnson explores the reasons for the revival's spectacular success there, suggesting important links between its moral accounting and the city's new industrial world. In a new preface, he reassesses his evidence and his conclusions in this major work.

Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz brilliantly recapture the forgotten story of Matthias the Prophet, imbuing their richly researched account with the dramatic force of a novel. In the hands of Johnson and Wilentz, the strange tale of Matthias opens a fascinating window into the turbulent movements of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening-movements that swept up great numbers of evangelical Americans and gave rise to new sects like the Mormons. Into this teeming environment walked a down-and-out carpenter named Robert Matthews, who announced himself as Matthias, prophet of the God of the Jews. His hypnotic personality drew in a cast of unforgettable characters-the meekly devout businessman Elijah Pierson, who once tried to raise his late wife from the dead; the young attractive Christian couple, Benjamin Folger and his wife Ann (who seduced the woman-hating Prophet); and the shrewd ex-slave Isabella Van Wagenen, regarded by some as "the most wicked of the wicked." None was more colorful than the Prophet himself, a bearded, thundering tyrant who gathered his followers into an absolutist household, using their money to buy an elaborate, eccentric wardrobe, and reordering their marital relations. By the time the tensions within the kingdom exploded into a clash with the law, Matthias had become a national scandal. "Written with the sweep and narrative drive of a best seller.... It has sex and sexual depravity, violence, murder, a courtroom drama, a media feeding frenzy, prostitution, lunacy, theft, religion (plenty of that), politics, social commentary, subtle humor, a fascinating if weird cast of characters, and a surprise ending." -Atlantic Monthly "The Kingdom of Matthias is about marginality, fantasy, commerce, sex, and the soul's hunger, and the classically American combustion of all of the above.... A delicious and disturbing book." -Leon Wieseltier "As exciting as a novel...a wonderful book that will keep you up all night." -Katha Pollitt

Political disagreement is widespread within the communication network of ordinary citizens; furthermore, political diversity within these networks is entirely consistent with a theory of democratic politics built on the importance of individual interdependence. The persistence of political diversity and disagreement does not imply that political interdependence is absent among citizens or that political influence is lacking. The book's analysis makes a number of contributions. The authors demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of political disagreement. They show that communication and influence within dyads is autoregressive - that the consequences of dyadic interactions depend on the distribution of opinions within larger networks of communication. They argue that the autoregressive nature of political influence serves to sustain disagreement within patterns of social interaction, as it restores the broader political relevance of social communication and influence. They eliminate the deterministic implications that have typically been connected to theories of democratic politics based on interdependent citizens.

Paul E. Johnson, hasn't always served the Lord within a university context. For a decade Paul and his wife labored as Bible teachers and church planters in urban central Mexico. Concurrently Paul also worked to ignite a mission vision among believers and with church leaders. As a Great Commission vision grew, Paul worked with key leaders to launch a mission agency among the Bible Churches of central Mexico. * * * Today, Paul is passionate about effectively mobilizing young adults to go and make disciples-and to plant churches among all peoples, everywhere. How passionate? Paul himself went back to school. In his doctoral dissertation, he demonstrates that the core of Christ's mission is the making of mature disciples who are transformed into Christ's likeness and reproduce other holistic disciples to form disciple-making movements. * * * Paul E. Johnson, D.Min. (Western Seminary), Corban University's Intercultural Studies professor, also teaches Old and New Testament Survey and Dynamics of Church Development. On top of that, Johnson is the faculty advisor for The TrueNorth Corps (Corban's student missions organization), helps to plan Corban's annual BreakAway Retreat and World Outreach Week, and leads trips to various mission fields each summer.

Author Paul E. Johnson introduces researchers to the key questions, concepts, terminology, methods, and results of social choice theory, a method of aggregating individualAEs preferences into societal preferences (such as voting). By presenting technical details from the oground up,oe Johnson first introduces readers to the effects that decision-making procedures have on social choice. He next explains the idea of a social preference function, a rule that is used to take into account individuals, preferences when creating social ordering. He explores the basics and implications of ArrowAEs possibility theorem and the implications and applications of the uni-dimensional spatial model. Social Choice: Theory and Research concludes with an investigation of the multidimensional spatial model and an exploration of the instability of majority rule, including a discussion of chaos theory. Students in political theory, public choice, and public finance will find Social Choice: Theory and Research a comprehensible introduction to social choice theory. Researchers interested in decision-making difficulties in government, international organizations, and corporations will find this a handy reference for their studies.

Eight leading scholars have joined forces to give us the most comprehensive book to date on the history of African-American religion from the slavery period to the present. Beginning with Albert Raboteau's essay on the importance of the story of Exodus among African-American Christians and concluding with Clayborne Carson's work on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s religious development, this volume illuminates the fusion of African and Christian traditions that has so uniquely contributed to American religious development. Several common themes emerge: the critical importance of African roots, the traumatic discontinuities of slavery, the struggle for freedom within slavery and the subsequent experience of discrimination, and the remarkable creativity of African-American religious faith and practice. Together, these essays enrich our understanding of both African-American life and its part in the history of religion in America.