About the Author

THOMAS S. KIDD (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is associate professor of history at Baylor University. He has focused his research on American religion and has published several articles on the subject, especially on the colonial period. He has authored the books The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism and Awakenings: The First Generation of American Evangelical Christianity. Professor Kidd has led a Baylor conference on the global challenges facing Christianity, served on the university's advisory presidential search committee, and works as a mentor to the university's Crane Scholars Program.

Reviews

"Despite the prodigious attention to the 'Great Awakening' in eighteenth-century America, there has been, amazingly, no modern comprehensive account that looks at all regions from Nova Scotia to Georgia. The result is a highly fragmented series of vignettes and biographies with no overarching narrative. That void has now been more than filled by Thomas Kidd''s masterful analysis of the eighteenth-century revivals and the 'evangelical' movement they spawned. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, this book is must reading not only for early American historians, but for anyone concerned to understand the origins of modern evangelicalism."--Harry S. Stout, Yale University

"It has been fifty years since Edwin Gaustad told the history of New England's Great Awakening, and, since then, the revivals themselves have at times been almost lost sight of in debates about the fictions of memory and the invention of tradition. Thomas Kidd's narrative, returning squarely to the formative events and factions that shaped early evangelicalism, offers a valuable synoptic account of the beginnings of this continuously important movement."--Leigh E. Schmidt, Princeton University

"Well researched, clearly written and authoritatively argued. There is no book of comparable breadth, either chronologically or geographically."--Mark Noll, University of Notre Dame

"With this deeply researched and beautifully focused study of the origins of American evangelicalism, Thomas Kidd gives us nothing less than a fresh, post-revisionist understanding of the Great Awakening. But that is not all. By casting a powerful light upon the controversies at the outset of the evangelical movement, particularly those revolving around the third person of the Trinity, he illuminates the rest of that movement's conflicted history, providing insight into its enduring complexities, and its likely manifestations in the century ahead."--Wilfred McClay, author of "The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America"

" With this deeply researched and beautifully focused study of the origins of American evangelicalism, Thomas Kidd gives us nothing less than a fresh, post-revisionist understanding of the Great Awakening. But that is not all. By casting a powerful light upon the controversies at the outset of the evangelical movement, particularly those revolving around the third person of the Trinity, he illuminates the rest of that movement' s conflicted history, providing insight into its enduring complexities, and its likely manifestations in the century ahead." -- Wilfred McClay, author of "The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America"

" It has been fifty years since Edwin Gaustad told the history of New England' s Great Awakening, and, since then, the revivals themselves have at times been almost lost sight of in debates about the fictions of memory and the invention of tradition. Thomas Kidd' s narrative, returning squarely to the formative events and factions that shaped early evangelicalism, offers a valuable synoptic account of the beginnings of this continuously important movement." -- Leigh E. Schmidt, Princeton University