The Great Awakening: Preaching That Crossed the Colonies
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What students do
- Explain how itinerant preachers and cheap printed sermons carried a religious revival between colonies
- Sort the New Light and Old Light positions using evidence from both sides
- Read Jonathan Edwards's 1741 Enfield sermon and identify the persuasion techniques it uses
- Judge what a sermon can prove about a preacher's own words, and what it cannot prove about the people listening
What it covers
- Why an established, tax-funded church made a traveling preacher controversial
- What happened in Northampton starting in 1734, and how Edwards counted its converts
- How the New Light and Old Light split reshaped colonial denominations
- Why colonists arguing about the same sermon in the same month was new in the 1730s and 1740s
Learning targets
- Explain what the Great Awakening was and when it swept the colonies.
- Describe how traveling preachers reached crowds no building could hold.
- Analyze a 1741 sermon for the techniques that moved its listeners.
- Explain why the new preaching split colonists into two rival camps.
- Evaluate how one shared event helped link the colonies together.
From one teacher to another
A tax-funded, established church had no way to handle a preacher who ignored parish lines, and that's the friction everything that follows is built on. Students trace how cheap printed sermons let traveling preachers reach farther than they could ever walk, and they work out where each camp in the New Light and Old Light fight actually stood from the arguments themselves. I have them close by reading Edwards's own words from the 1741 Enfield sermon and asking what a sermon can prove about a preacher, and what it can never prove about the people sitting in the pews.
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