The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield

The Great Awakening was not a single event but a season, a period of extraordinary religious intensity that swept through the American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century and left the landscape of American Christianity permanently altered. Joseph Tracy's history of that revival remains, nearly two centuries after its original publication, the definitive treatment of what happened when George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards found themselves at the center of one of the most remarkable movements of the Holy Spirit in modern church history. Tracy's account is meticulous and well documented, drawing on firsthand sources to reconstruct the scope and character of the revival: the widespread conversions, the sharp increase in church membership, the formation of new denominations, and the profound sense of conviction and redemption that attended the preaching of the Gospel across the colonies. This was not enthusiasm without substance. It was a genuine movement that reshaped the religious, cultural, and eventually political landscape of a nation in the making. For students of American history, church history, or the theology of revival, Tracy's account is essential reading, an authenticated record of one of the most important and remarkable eras in the history of the Christian church in the modern world.