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,...