Preface: Whitney Cross’s Burned-over District at 75

Abstract: Whitney Cross wrote an extraordinary account of the forces that shaped western and central New York State in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. He analyzes how they created an ideal site for the rise of religious and reform movements as well as for commerce and industry. When he researched his book in the 1940s, there were few sources available to study the roles that women played in that period. Such sources appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, transforming our understanding of the region and its transformative movements. Not only did women play critical roles in stoking the fires of religion and reform that burned across the area but non-evangelical women, particularly Quakers, played an outsized role in the most radical of those movements, abolition and women’s rights. This essay highlights the roles of women, and especially female Friends, in the Burned-Over District.