Book Review

Canada and the United States

Frank Lambert's level-headed account of mid-eighteenth-century colonial revivals quietly abridges claims made in the 1960s and 1970s about political and social upheaval in the "Great Awakening." Limiting his discussion largely to the years between 1735 and 1750, Lambert stresses the "regional and intercolonial" character of the New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey revivals (p. 253); their deliberately "sequenced invention" that spanned both sides of the Atlantic (p. 254); and the revivals' "contested" character as well as their status as "part of a colonial cultural war" (p. 255). If the book as a whole somewhat contradicts this last argument, the friction scarcely detracts from an otherwise important survey of modern revivalism's New World debut in two important regions of colonial British America.	1
Lambert essentially argues that 1980s critics of broad claims for the power of the "Great Awakening," including this reviewer, threw the baby out with the bath water; they shrunk the revivals' import and character and left readers little more than Joseph Tracy's now-famous book, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (1842).	2
Lambert instead takes up the middle ground. He argues that evangelicals invented diverse yet coordinated intercolonial revivals in New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania between 1735 and 1750. These revivals upset the standing order wherever they appeared, drenched the colonial press in a war of words, and brought evangelicalism and its revivals center stage in rapidly expanding colonies. But Lambert nowhere stresses political and social upheavals with links to the American Revolution that so fascinated historians thirty years ago.	. . .