The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725 1775 - Hardcover

Smith Texas A&M University–Comm, John Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 161147714X ISBN 13: 9781611477146

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014

Synopsis

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. © National Portrait Gallery, London

About this title

About the Author

John Howard Smith is associate professor of history as Texas A&M University-Commerce.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 161147714X
• ISBN 13: 9781611477146
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 356