The Great Awakening

A revival is a wave of religious awakening in which preaching addresses the individual's feelings rather than the church's doctrine. The Awakening is the first event to strike all thirteen colonies at once and give them a shared experience across borders — historians have long identified it as a precondition for a common American identity being possible at all. George Whitefield's tours were also an early mass-media phenomenon, advertised in newspapers and followed by printed accounts. The habit of judging an authority and rejecting it transfers without much difficulty to politics thirty years later.