Great Awakening.

One of the most important developments in eighteenth-century American religion was the emergence of a widespread religious revival, or awakening, as it was called by the people of the time. Periods of intense religious feeling, marked by large numbers of people joining churches or renewing their ties to their religious groups, were a feature of American religion almost from the beginning of English settlement. The ministry of John Cotton is said to have sparked such a period of renewal among Boston's Puritan settlers as early as 1633. About a hundred years later a series of revivals swept through all of Britain's American colonies and had a lasting influence. These revivals of the 1730s and 1740s came to be known as the first Great Awakening. They were supported in part by the work of George Whitefield, an English minister who visited America seven...