• Richard Bushman
“The law and authority personified in administering organizations opened way under the influence first of financial objectives and next of the spiritual pressures of the Great Awakening . . . As, in the expanding eighteenth century, traders and peasants held free to seek money with an avidity perilously confined to greed, the forces delivered exercised overwhelming oppression upon conventional bounds. When the Great Awakening appended its division of adversary, the old establishments started to disintegrate.”
• Gary Nash
“What has motivated ancient American historians to evade inquiries about the class structure and the expansion of lower-class administrative awareness is not only an objection to Marxist conceptualizations of past but also the story that class associations did not value in early America because there were no classes. . . . By the completion of the Seven Years’ War, famine on a measure that metropolitan heads obtained horrifying had developed in New York and Philadelphia. Many metropolitan Americans, living amidst historical cells that were converting the cultural aspect, came to observe opposing classes based on financial and cultural setting; . . . they started to grapple throughout these opposing powers, and in these efforts, they contracted a cognizance of class.”