With our American Philosophy and Religion series, Applewood reissues many primary sources published throughout American history. Through these books, scholars, interpreters, students, and non-academics alike can see the thoughts and beliefs of Americans who came before us.

Boston Congregationalist ministers Charles Chauncy (1705-1787) and Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766) were significant political as well as religious leaders in colonial and revolutionary New England. Scholars have often stressed their influence on major shifts in New England theology, and have also portrayed Mayhew as an influential preacher, whose works helped shape American revolutionary ideology, and Chauncy as an active leader of the patriot cause. Through a deeply contextualised re-examination of the two ministers as ‘men of their times’, Oakes offers a fresh, comparative interpretation of how their religious and political views changed and interacted over decades. The result is a thoroughly revised reading of Chauncy’s and Mayhew’s most innovative ideas. Conservative Revolutionaries unearths strongly traditionalist elements in their belief systems, focussing on their shared commitment to a dissenting worldview based on the ideals of their Protestant New England and British heritage. Oakes concludes with a provocative exploration of how their shifting theological and political positions may have helped redefine prevailing notions of human identity, capability, and destiny.

"A Wonderful Work of God: Puritanism and the Great Awakening is a survey of the American phase of the Evangelical Revival which swept Britain and her American colonies during the first half of the eighteenth century. Preceded by local revivals, such as the one stirred by Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1734, the Great Awakening exploded into a mass movement because of the itinerant preaching of a young Anglican priest, George Whitefield, and a number of Congregational and Presbyterian ministers who joined him in the evangelical work. However, because of the bizarre behavior of some of the radical evangelicals, such as James Davenport, the movement soon became highly controversial and split colonial ministers and congregations into "Friends of Revival" and "Opposers." As the revival excitement abated, schisms beset congregations in New England and eastern Long Island, resulting in the appearance of separate churches, and the Philadelphia Presbyterian synod was fractured as well." "Drawing on both original sources and a review of the relevant literature, the author places the Great Awakening in the context of the Puritanism of the times, both in Europe and the colonies, and discusses its roots in German Pietism and the Methodist revivals in England. The significant figures of the Awakening and their interactions are brought to life, particularly James Davenport, the Awakening's most bizarre exponent and the preacher who, more than any other, was responsible for bringing it into disrepute."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Old Brick was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Charles Chauncy was a powerful and influential figure in his own time, but in historical accounts he has always been overshadowed by his contemporaries Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards. When he is remembered today, it is usually as Edwards's chief antagonist during the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Yet Chauncy's fellow New Englanders knew that there was more to the man than that. In the course of his 60-year tenure as a pastor of Boston's First Church (the "Old Brick"), Chauncy involved himself in most of the important intellectual, religious, and political issues of the century. Not only did he aggressively oppose the emotional revivalism of the Great Awakening, but he was also a bold pamphleteer and preacher in support of the American Revolution. In theology Chauncy became, as an old man, the leading advocate probably having scandalized his own forebears, but he insisted that he was true to his Protestant tradition and never abandoned his reliance on Scripture and Puritan discipline in favor of rationalist secularism. Old Brick,the first full-scale biography of Charles Chauncy, attempts to recover not only Chauncy the spokesman for the ideas of a great many colonial Americans, but also the complex man who struggled with himself and with the events of his time to arrive at those positions. The portrait of Chauncy that emerges is fuller, more comprehensive, and more balanced than the stereotypes and partial portraits that have thus far represented him in history. This biography now makes it possible to consider Chauncy a figure worthy of study in his own right and to take a fresh look at eighteenth-century New England in light of the tradition Chauncy represents.