The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America

Thomas S. Kidd's The Great Awakening, The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, published by Yale University Press in 2007, is a scholarly history of the eighteenth century revivalist movement that swept the American colonies and, in Kidd's argument, laid the groundwork for the distinct religious style that became American evangelicalism. Kidd is a historian of American religion working from colonial sermons, correspondence and revival accounts. Its strength is that it treats the Awakening as a genuinely trans-denominational movement with lasting institutional consequences rather than a series of isolated local revivals. Its limit is that the Great Awakening as a single, unified colonial-wide event is itself a historiographical construct some historians have challenged as overstating the coordination between what were often separate regional revivals, a debate Kidd's narrative engages but does not fully resolve for every reader.