Short answers to common questions about the Great Awakenings
The Great Awakenings were periods of intense Protestant religious revival in American history. Historians usually identify a First Great Awakening (c. 1730s–1740s), a Second Great Awakening (c. 1790s–1840s) and a Third Great Awakening (late 19th century); some also describe a Fourth Great Awakening beginning in the 1960s.
The best-known figures are Jonathan Edwards, the Northampton, Massachusetts minister whose 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" became famous, and George Whitefield, the English preacher whose open-air tours of the colonies drew very large crowds. Gilbert Tennent and other "New Light" ministers were also important. See The First Great Awakening.
Cane Ridge was a camp meeting held in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in August 1801. Contemporary estimates of attendance range from about 10,000 to 20,000 people, and it became a symbol of the frontier revivals of the Second Great Awakening. See The Second Great Awakening.
Revival preaching that stressed personal moral responsibility fed directly into reform causes, including abolitionism, temperance, early women's rights activism, prison reform and public education. Charles Grandison Finney and Lyman Beecher are often associated with this connection between revival and reform.
The Social Gospel was a late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant movement that applied Christian ethics to social problems such as poverty, child labour and unsafe working conditions. Walter Rauschenbusch was its best-known theologian. It is usually discussed alongside the Third Great Awakening; see The Third Great Awakening.
The term "Great Awakening" was applied by later writers, not by the participants themselves. Because revivals rose and fell unevenly across regions, historians draw the boundaries differently, and some question whether the idea of distinct "awakenings" is useful at all. Dates on this site are approximate and follow common usage.
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