The effects and counter effects of a little known religious revival lead by Charles Finney in upstate New York in 1830 began a change of events that would be felt long after Finney's visit and far beyond the boundaries of the river town of Rochester.

Charles Finney, a talented lawyer turned Presbyterian evangelist spearheaded the Christian social justice movement that produced the abolitionist movement, prohibition, woman's suffrage and the Civil War. Finney challenged the traditional belief in Predestination by his stand on duty to one's fellow human beings.

Thousands of people came to his revival in the river-town of Rochester and were transformed by his message. He set them afire with religious zeal - hence upper New York became known as the Burnt Over District and this novel received its name.

A door had been opened for men like Frederick Douglass (a black man) to publish an abolitionists newspaper. Rochester would become an important part of the Anti-Slavery Movement and the Underground Railroad.

Rochester was also the birthplace of the woman's rights movement in the person of Susan B. Anthony. The ancient roles of women would, at last, be challenged along with the other attitudes that had hitherto suffocated the dignity of large numbers of the human race.

All this is not to imply that the utopia dreamed of in Finney's day was in fact realized. Quite the contrary, an upheaval occurred. forces were set in motion that could not be stopped. But it is only when humans are stressed that agitation conceives change to which complacency could not give birth.

I came to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism to receive, and how distressed I am until it is over! Do you suppose that I came to bring peace to the world? No, not peace, but division. -Luke 12:49-51

Through the fictional characters of my book, I dramatize vividly the transformation of human beings representing every facet of 1830 American life. From their cold and bitter Puritan roots; the tyranny of slavery; the oppression of immigrant peoples; and the greed of the emerging industrial revolution, to the upheaval that produced the Civil War, my characters tell a passionate, painful, and uplifting story of a nation giving birth to the ideal of social justice.