Jonathan Edward's Most Popular Work: “The Life of David Brainerd” and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture

1985 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Conforti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Student Leaders ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
New Haven ◽  
College Administration ◽  
First Great Awakening ◽  
Early American ◽  
Evangelical Culture ◽  
Popular Work

When students of early American religion remember David Brainerd, if they remember him at all, it is usually in the context of the First Great Awakening. Born in Haddam, Connecticut in 1718, Brainerd enrolled at Yale in 1739, shortly after he had experienced conversion. By his sophomore year, when New Haven was aflame with the religious fervor that spread like a brush fire through New England, Brainerd was recognized as one of the “New Light” student leaders at Yale. For this reason, he was among the first undergraduates to be disciplined by the college administration as part of an effort to contain religious enthusiasm. Rector Thomas Clap expelled Brainerd in 1742 for remarking that tutor Chauncy Whittelsey had no more grace than a chair and for attending a meeting of Separate Congregationalists in defiance of college rules.

Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared

1987 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
First Great Awakening ◽  
Revival Movements ◽  
British Colonies

Current interpretations of North America's first Great Awakening present a paradox. Historians commonly interpret the Great Awakening as part of the revival of evangelical piety that affected widely scattered elements of the Protestant world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, studies of the Great Awakening have almost exclusively focused on the particular local circumstances in which the revival movements developed. Since historians of the Great Awakening have emphasized the peculiar circumstances of each of the regional manifestations, the Revival often appears in their writings to have been composed of several distinct movements separated in time, character, and cause and united only by superficial similarities. In contrast, to say that the local revival movements, despite their distinctive characteristics, were manifestations of a single larger movement is to imply that they shared the same general causes. If we suppose that the Great Awakening was part of the Evangelical Revival, our attempts to explain its origins should take into account those general causes.Two recent reconsiderations of the eighteenth-century revival movements in their broader context come to opposite conclusions. Jon Butler underscores the span of time over which the revivals occurred across the British colonies, their heterogeneous character from one region to the next, and the differences in cultural contexts in which they appeared. He concludes that “the prerevolutionary revivals should be understood primarily as regional events.” Although he sees the eighteenth-century American revivals as part of the long-term evangelical and pietistic reform movement in Western society, he denies any common, single, overwhelmingly important cause.

scholarly journals The Theological Polemics of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield: Differences in Their Understanding of the "Great Awakening" of the 1740s in New England

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-171
Author(s):  
Irina Yur'evna Khruleva
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
First Great Awakening ◽  
British America ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ideological Space ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
First Time

The first "Great Awakening" took hold of all British colonies in North America in the 1730s-1750s and developed contemporaneously with the Enlightenment movement, which had a significant impact on all aspects of life in the colonies, influencing religion, politics and ideology. The inhabitants of the colonies, professing different religious views, for the first time experienced a general spiritual upsurge. The colonies had never seen anything like the Great Awakening in scale and degree of influence on society. This was the first movement in American history that was truly intercolonial in nature, contributing to the formation of a single religious and partially ideological space in British America. The beginning of the Great Awakening in British America was instigated by both the colonial traditions of religious renewal (the so-called "revivals") and new ideas coming from Europe, hence this religious movement cannot be understood without considering its European roots nor not taking into account its transatlantic nature. The development of pietism in Holland and Germany and the unfolding of Methodism on the British Isles greatly influenced Protestant theology on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the differences in understanding the nature of the Great Awakening by its two leaders - J. Edwards and J. Whitefield.

The Substance of Doctrine: New England Calvinism and the Problem of Orthodoxy

2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 418-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
New Haven ◽  
New Divinity

This essay examines how underlying differing theologies of authority informed mid nineteenth-century Calvinist polemics and ultimately the fragmentation of the New Divinity in New England. Focusing on the polemical career of Nathaniel William Taylor, these differences were evident in earlier Unitarian controversies yet emerged as Taylor and his New Haven allies incrementally departed from historic confessional language.

The Factory

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Gordon ◽  
Patrick M. Malone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Capital Expenditure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Development ◽  
Textile Mill ◽  
Early American ◽  
Industrial Buildings

With Samuel Slater’s textile mill (1793, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island) and Eli Whitney’s armory (1798, in Whitneyville, Connecticut), American entrepreneurs began to make in factories products that had formerly been made in homes or craft shops. Another new concept in manufacturing, the principle of uniformity (sometimes described as “interchangeability”), was also winning converts in America. Factories making uniform products increasingly used power-driven machinery in the production process. However, it is a mistake to conflate mechanization, factories, and uniformity. Mechanization was used in colonial craft shops as well as in nineteenth-century factories. Until the late nineteenth century, factory managers achieved uniformity primarily through improved handwork skills and gauging rather than with machinery. Chapter 9 will cover the mechanization of work in factories as well as efforts to achieve uniformity in machine parts. Many of the best examples of early American factories are in New England, where there was a serendipitous combination of water power, entrepreneurial capital, and the artisanal skills necessary to build mills and machinery. The textile mills erected there had a powerful influence on the evolution of American factory architecture. As we look closely at a number of New England mills, remember that similar patterns of structural development can be found in other regions of the United States and that the basic forms of the textile factory were readily adapted for other types of industry, including the manufacture of wood, metal, and paper products. Factories were not the first industrial buildings in America, nor did they represent more capital expenditure than some of the early and costly ironworks. Two processes of textile manufacturing and finishing, the carding of fibers and the fulling of woven cloth, had been powered by waterwheels (and occasionally by draft animals) before the first successful factory was built in Pawtucket in 1793. Proprietors of shops and country mills usually operated their enterprises directly with little of the managerial hierarchy and division of labor that would appear in the full-blown factory system. Shops lacked the factory’s sequential organization of powered machinery and its extensive mechanization through multiple stages of production.

The Allen School: An Alternative Nineteenth-Century Education, 1818-1852

1981 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-576
Author(s):  
Judith Strong Albert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alternative Education ◽  
New England ◽  
Educational Philosophy ◽  
Early Model ◽  
American Education ◽  
Early American ◽  
Bronson Alcott

In this account of an experiment in early American education, Judith Strong Albert draws upon the 1818 to 1852 journals of a distinguished New England teacher, Lucy Clark Ware Allen. Ms. Albert describes a nineteenth-century parsonage school that stressed the "innate goodness" of a child's nature and placed emphasis on practice and experience in education. She contrasts the educational philosophy held by Joseph and Lucy Allen, founders of the Allen School of Northborough, Massachusetts, with the views of the leading educational idealist of that era, Bronson Alcott, and provides an illuminating study of an early model in alternative education.

Timothy Breen, Thes Character of the Good Ruler: Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630–1730 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971, £4·50). pp. xx, 301. - Cedric B. Cowing, The Great Awakening and the American Revolution: Colonial Thought in the 18th Century (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1971). Pp. ix, 260. - John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1970, paperback 90p, $1·95). Pp. xvi, 201. - The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. IV, The Great Awakening, C. C. Goen, ed., (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972, $18·50). Pp. xii, 595. - Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971, £375). Pp. xxii, 214. - Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971, £5·75). Pp. xii, 440. - Alden T. Vaughan, ed., The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620–1730. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972, $9·95). Pp. xxviii, 348.

1973 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-199
Author(s):  
Robert M. Bliss
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
New England ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Oxford University Press
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document