The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 17251775 [Hardcover]

The First Great Awakening, an unprecedented surge in Protestant Christian revivalism in the Eighteenth Century, sparked enormous of controversy at the time and has been a source of scholarly debate ever since. Few historians have sought to write a synthetic history of the First Great Awakening, and in recent decades it has been challenged as having happened at all, being either an exaggeration or an invention. The First Great Awakening expands the movements geographical, theological, and sociopolitical scope. Rather than focus exclusively on the clerical elites, as earlier studies have done, it deals with them alongside ordinary people, and includes the experiences of women, African Americans, and Indians as the observers and participants they were. It challenges prevailing scholarly opinion concerning what the revivals were and what they meant to the formation of American religious identity and culture.

Cover image: NPG 131, George Whitefield by John Wollaston, oil on canvas, circa 1742. ? National Portrait Gallery, London

Historian Smith rejects the argument that this important event in US intellectual and religious history was nothing more than the invention of the preachers of the Second Great Awakening and seeks to redefine the movement. The genesis of the Awakening, he argues, flows from German Pietism, Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, and Puritanism. Smith provides ample coverage of the major figures of the First Great AwakeningJonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennant, George Whitefield, and the radical James Davenportas well as the anti-revivalist opposition of those such as Charles Chauncy. Instead of ending the Awakening in 1745, he expands it to include the southern colonies in the late 1740s and 1750s through the preaching of Baptists and Presbyterians, a revival that continued into the 1770s. Smith contends the Awakening helped plow the ground from which the AlSu