Joined: 26 Aug 2010 Age: 69 Gender: Male Posts: 35,189 Location: temperate zone
20 Jun 2024, 9:40 pm
Thanx for posting.
The host of that video always does a fantastically informative job of scholarly exposition in his series of Utube vids on religion called "Religion for Breakfast".
Those crazy ...yet oddly innovative...weirdos called the "Shakers" evolved a "culturally lethal trait"(as one of my anthropology textbooks put it): total celibacy, that insured their demise. Yet the always small and now virtually extinct group left quite an impact on America.
As the vid shows they...broke the glass ceiling for cult leaders (they had a woman lead them down the garden path instead of having a man as their cult leader like Joseph Smith or like most cults then and now). They also pioneered industrial mass production (in pharmacy medicine), and ironically...they were so artless that they were avant guard artists...by inventing modern functionalism in furniture a century before it became a thing.
Similarly ---at least one of their hymns, "Simple Gifts", has become part of the musical DNA of America itself.
And its still being quoted by American composers to this day. Here is a famous instance of borrowing by Aaron Copeland in the 1930s as part of his suite "Appalachian Spring".
20 Jun 2024, 6:49 pm
