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William Miller began preaching his belief that the world would end around the year 1843 with the Second Coming of Christ.
This prediction was based on Miller’s own interpretation of portions of the Books of David and Revelations in the Bible. Miller worked hard to spread his message by preaching anywhere a congregation would listen, and had only mild success in winning converts for the first eight years.

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Miller met and won the help of Joshua V. Himes, whose promotional skills soon spread Miller’s message to far more people than Miller himself ever expected to reach. Miller’s lectures on his belief of the coming end were advertised partly by funding itinerant speakers and professional organizers with revivalist style meetings, but mostly by Himes’ publishing his own regular newspaper devoted to the cause, called the Signs of the Times, which was widely distributed. Soon Miller’s message had believers stretching across the states from Maine to Michigan... and there’s evidence that he even won converts in England as well. By his own estimate, Miller had between 50,000 and 100,000 followers by the year of his prediction.

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There were mainly two reasons why so many accepted Miller’s biblical interpretation in the first place. The first reason is that his message was actually pretty orthodox for the time; it meshed well with many variations on Christian beliefs in the states. This is because many Christian sects implied and/or taught that the newfound colonies in America were to be the staging grounds for the coming kingdom of Christ, a somewhat arrogant, but appealing, idea that Miller’s message reinforced. Him and his followers finally became enough of a fixture in American religious life to be talked about by others, most of the criticism they endured was because they had dared to predict the date Christ would return, a date most other sects concerned with such things felt was beyond human knowledge to comprehend. The second reason Miller’s message was so palatable to so many was that until 1843, there was no separate Millerite sect. Miller encouraged believers to remain in their current churches and sects while they awaited the Second Coming; because of this attitude, Miller was often invited to give sermons at churches because the ministers and priests wanted to attract more members to their congregations (a fact that fairly annoyed Miller, since the ministers and priests themselves rarely listened to or believed his message themselves).

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The story of WIlliam Miller and his followers who believed the world would end on October 22, 1844

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William Miller was the leader of the Millerism movement. He was a prosperous farmer, a Baptist lay preacher, and student of the Bible, living in northeastern New York. Miller spent years of intensive study of symbolic meaning of the prophecies of Daniel, especially Daniel 8:14 (Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed), the 2300 day prophecy which theorized that day meant year and therefore, it was predicting the second coming to happen in the lifetime of people in the mid 19th century. Miller believed that the cleansing of the sanctuary represented the Earth's destruction by fire at Christ's Second Coming. He sparked the movement (hence why it’s named after him) by publishing his ideas to the Vermont Telegraph—a Baptist paper- where it began to gain a following.

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The millerite movement never really reached any of its goals (it's goal being convincing everyone that the second coming was upon them and then it actually happening). People waited beside graves expecting family members to rise from the dead, people panicked, and destruction ensued. When the dust settled, millers was discredited entirely and eventually died out leaving only a title of "religious insanity" behind. By the 1850s the Millerites were considered an unusual fad which had come and gone.

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today there are still some denominations that believe in and preach Christ’s soon (if not imminent) return to earth, one of them being the Advent Christian denomination, which founded this school in 1893. So for them, these charts have great theological significance. In post-millerite era, the term "religious insanity" was coined directly with the millerites in mind, so it left the mark on what the public perceives about religious extremists.