HIS 161 US History Research Project: The First Great Awakening: Secondary Sources -- Books from Our Catalog

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 movement's 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. (c) National Portrait Gallery, London

"Both the sources he employs and the scope of his study set his work apart from all that have precede it...The first study of New England preaching to span the entire colonial period...very important book."- Journal of American History"Simply breathtaking in scope. No one else has dared to grapple with the full sweep of Puritan preaching form the founding of New England through the American Revolution."- Nathan O. Hatch, University of Notre Dame"A massive achievement will stand as the definitive work on this important subject."- Reviews in American History"Impressive, imaginative, sensible, and lucid."- Donald G. Matthews, University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill"[Stout] has created a field of scholarship hitherto neglected - the manuscript sermon as a source of religious culture in colonial times. More than that, he has shown the extent to which sermon notes add to our knowledge of the times, notably for the period of the Great Awakening. And he has doneso with great insight."- New England Quarterly"So soundly based on exhaustive research and so lucid in presentation, that even its most surprising conclusions carry conviction. An impressive achievement."- Daniel Walker Howe, author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848"One of the most impressive studies of Puritan New England society to appear in this century....Throughout the work, Stout enriches, supplements and revises much of the current knowledge about colonial New England. His language, which is both precise and playful, makes the volume a delight to read."-The Historian"Will surely become a benchmark in the study of early American history and culture."-Journal of the American Academy of Religion

In this pathbreaking study, Patricia Bonomi argues that religion was as instrumental as either politics or the economy in shaping early American life and values. Looking at the middle and southern colonies as well as at Puritan New England, Bonomi finds an abundance of religious vitalitythrough the colonial years among clergy and churchgoers of diverse religious background. The book also explores the tightening relationship between religion and politics and illuminates the vital role religion played in the American Revolution. A perennial backlist title first published in 1986,this updated edition includes a new preface on research in the field on African Americans, Indians, women, the Great Awakening, and Atlantic history and how these impact her interpretations.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is a towering figure in American history. A controversial theologian and the author of the famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he ignited the momentous Great Awakening of the 18th century.

The third volume in Studies in Rhetoric & Religion, Preaching Politics traces the surprising and lasting influence of one of American history's most fascinating and enigmatic figuresâGeorge Whitefield. Jerome Mahaffey explores George Whitefield's role in creating a "rhetoric of community" that successfully established a common worldview among the many colonial cultures. Using a rigorous method of rhetorical analysis, Mahaffey cogently argues that George Whitefield directed the evolution of an American collective religious identity that lay underneath the emerging political ideology that fueled the American Revolution.

This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors of today's evangelical movement, bitterly assaulted the Congregational establishment. The 1740s and 1750s were the dark night of the New England soul, as men and women groped toward a restructured religious order. Conflict transformed inclusive parishes into exclusive networks of combative spiritual seekers. Then as now, evangelicalism emboldened ordinary people to question traditional authorities. Their challenge shattered whole communities.

During the late seventeenth century, a heterogeneous mixture of Protestant settlers made their way to the South Carolina lowcountry from both the Old World and elsewhere in the New. Representing a hodgepodge of European religious traditions, they shaped the foundations of a new and distinct plantation society in the British-Atlantic world. The Lords Proprietors of Carolina made vigorous efforts to recruit Nonconformists to their overseas colony by granting settlers considerable freedom of religion and liberty of conscience. Codified in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, this toleration ultimately attracted a substantial number of settlers of many and varying Christian denominations. In The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism, Thomas J. Little refutes commonplace beliefs that South Carolina grew spiritually lethargic and indifferent to religion in the colonial era. Little argues that pluralism engendered religious renewal and revival, which developed further after Anglicans in the colony secured legal establishment for their church. The Carolina colony emerged at the fulcrum of an international Protestant awakening that embraced a more emotional, individualistic religious experience and helped to create a transatlantic evangelical movement in the mid-eighteenth century. Offering new perspectives on both early American history and the religious history of the colonial South, The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism charts the regional spread of early evangelicalism in the too-often neglected South Carolina lowcountry�the economic and cultural center of the lower southern colonies. Although evangelical Christianity has long been and continues to be the dominant religion of the American South, historians have traditionally described it as a comparatively late-flowering development in British America. Reconstructing the history of religious revivalism in the lowcountry and placing the subject firmly within an Atlantic world context, Little demonstrates that evangelical Christianity had much earlier beginnings in prerevolutionary southern society than historians have traditionally recognized.

Gathering the attention and excitement of American colonists from Boston to Charleston, the religious revival of the 1740s traditionally known as the First Great Awakening provided colonial newspaper printers with their first story of transcolonial importance. At the time of the Awakening, American newspapers had become a vital part of the colonial information network as each major city offered at least one weekly paper. Papers printed weekly reports on revivalist preaching, eye-witness accounts of revival meetings, shocking stories of improper ordinations and church separations, as well as numerous contributed letters praising or denouncing virtually every aspect of the Awakening. No other colonial event of the 1740s, including the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Jacobite Rebellion (1745), came close to receiving as much newspaper coverage, making the First Great Awakening America's first "Big Story." In The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story, Lisa Smith offers the first scholarly work to examine in detail the printed newspaper record of the revival. This comprehensive, in-depth examination of colonial newspapers over a ten-year period uncovers information on shifts in the presentation of the revival over time, specific differences in regional reporting, and significant transformations in the newspaper personae of popular revivalists such as George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. Using original newspaper excerpts and graphs revealing reporting trends, this book presents an engaging, detailed picture of how colonial newspaper printers covered the experience of the First Great Awakening.

Margaret Meuse Clay, who barely escaped a public whipping in the 1760s for preaching without a license; "Old Elizabeth," an ex-slave who courageously traveled to the South to preach against slavery in the early nineteenth century; Harriet Livermore, who spoke in front of Congress four times between 1827 and 1844--these are just a few of the extraordinary women profiled in this, the first comprehensive history of female preaching in early America. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Catherine Brekus examines the lives of more than a hundred female preachers--both white and African American--who crisscrossed the country between 1740 and 1845. Outspoken, visionary, and sometimes contentious, these women stepped into the pulpit long before twentieth-century battles over female ordination began. They were charismatic, popular preachers, who spoke to hundreds and even thousands of people at camp and revival meetings, and yet with but a few notable exceptions--such as Sojourner Truth--these women have essentially vanished from our history. Recovering their stories, Brekus shows, forces us to rethink many of our common assumptions about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American culture.

"Prayer for a saving issue" : from Puritans to Evangelicals -- "A shower of divine blessing" : Jonathan Edwards and A faithful narrative -- "Soul-satisfying sealings of God's everlasting love" : continental pietism, Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, and early evangelicalism -- "Plentiful effusions of God's spirit in these parts" : George Whitefield comes to America -- The danger of an unconverted ministry : fractious revivalism in the middle colonies -- "A faithful watchman on the walls of Charlestown" : Josiah Smith and moderate revivalism in South Carolina -- "This is no other than the gate of heaven" : George Whitefield in New England -- "Blowing up the divine fire" : mass revivalism in New England, 1740-1741 -- "Minds extraordinarily transported" : testing the limits of revivalism, 1741-1742 -- "Under the impressions of a heated imagination" : James Davenport, Andrew Croswell, and the fracturing of New England evangelicalism -- "Beyond any former outpouring of the Spirit" : debating the legitimacy of the awakenings -- "The Gospel is not preached here" : the crisis of New England separatism -- "Bringing them to a subjection to the religion of Jesus" : Native American missions -- "Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God" : slavery, African Americans, and evangelicalism -- "Do the Holy Scriptures countenance such wild disorder?" : evangelicalism in Virginia -- "A happy revival of religion in the interior parts" : evangelicalism in the Carolinas -- "There is really a great awakening in those parts" : the evangelical revivals of the 1760s -- "The God of glory is on our side" : evangelicals and the American Revolution -- "Many thought the day of judgment was come" : the new light stir of 1776-1783.