GREAT AWAKENING, a remarkable religious revival centring in New England in 174o-43, but covering all the Ameri can colonies by 175o. Its way was prepared by Jonathan Ed wards (q.v.) who, in 1734, inaugurated at Northampton the revival that, in 1740-41, was taken up by George Whitefield (q.v.) in Massachusetts and Connecticut. He and his untrained clerical and lay followers roused by their emotional and dramatic preaching their hearers to so high a pitch of excitement and made such violent attacks on the many clergy who did not join them, that it became necessary for Edwards personally to reprimand Whitefield ; and when the latter returned to the colonies from England in 1744 he found that the faculties of Harvard and Yale had officially "testified" and "declared" against him and that most pulpits were closed to him.
The Awakening resulted in the formation of some separatist Churches, which died out or became Baptist congregations; and the religious apathy of New England during the late i 8th century may have been, at least in part, due to the reaction against the gross methods often employed. (See also REVIVAL, RELIGIOUS.) See Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening (Boston, 1842) ; Frederick M. Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals (19o5)