| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Inventing the "Great Awakening." By Frank Lambert. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiv, 300 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-691-04379-5.)

Like the moon exerting its pull on ocean waves, the historian Jon Butler has shaped the contours of current historical scholarship on the mid-eighteenth-century religious revivals in British North America. Butler's assertion in a journal article nearly two decades ago that the Great Awakening was an "interpretive fiction" sensitized scholars to the large gap that existed between the revivals' rhetoric and their reality. Frank Lambert's new book has narrowed that gap considerably. While conceding Butler's point that the Awakening's meaning has been socially constructed, Lambert demonstrates that the titanic struggle to define revivalism's meaning occurred in the eighteenth century, not in the nineteenth century as Butler's followers have maintained. 1

While unalloyed use of the phrase "the Great Awakening" technically did not occur until 1842 (a century after the revivals), Lambert's larger point is that what was written about is more important than what it was called. Lambert compiles and evaluates the veritable blizzard of pro- and anti-revivalist publications that poured forth from printing presses during 1735–1745, and he shows in painstaking detail the manner in which pro- and anti-revivalist parties invented widely differing accounts of the revivals. . . .

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