The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers

Stephen J. Stein is a historian of American religion, and this Yale University Press book is his standard scholarly comprehensive history of the United Society of Believers, the Shakers, tracing their communities across states including Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio. Its strength is genuinely comprehensive archival research across the movement's full history and geographic spread, rather than focusing on one community or period alone, making it the field's standard reference. Its limit is that as a comprehensive academic history it is not written from within the Shakers' own devotional voice, so a claim about how Shaker theology and practice are understood and lived by Shaker believers themselves needs a source presenting that internal perspective alongside this outside scholarly history.