Introduction
The longing for revival has long marked evangelicalism, a movement forged in the fires of the Great Awakening. While fragments of the story of its dramatic origins abound, a great deal about the long trajectory of evangelical revivals remains obscure. Historians have generally acknowledged that a movement of Protestant renewal erupted across the eighteenth- century Atlantic world.1 Eyewitness accounts corroborate the claim that a period of sustained religious fervor turned the British Empire upside down.2 But then the narrative turns murky and historical consensus proves evasive beyond the basic story: after a period of heightened religious activity during the early 1740s, the revivals fizzled out or ebbed only to flow again later.3 Step past this limited area of agreement and divergent 1. Even on this fundamental point, however, there is considerable debate. See for example, Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” The Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (1982): 305–25. 2. Evaluations of the revivals’ effects run the gamut. Charles Chauncy, a pastor in Boston, issued vehement denunciations. Charles Chauncy, Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against. A Sermon. With a Letter to the Reverend Mr. James Davenport (Boston: S. Eliot & J. Blanchard, 1742). For a more favorable contemporary assessment, see Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Company, 1906), 111–13. For a broader survey, which claims that no other event received as much newspaper coverage, see Lisa Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012). 3. Kidd argues for a long season of revival that stretches into the nineteenth century. Marini traces the continuation of Whitefieldian revival in radical sects. Westerkamp extends the Great Awakening into at least 1765. Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Stephen A Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge: Har-
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