4. Colonial Society -- Part 4

4. Colonial Society -- Part 4

  • Printing was either discouraged or re-garded after the establishment of Virginia in 1607.
    • The governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, summed up the attitude of the ruling class in 1671: "I thank God there are no free schools or printing."
    • Berkeley's undoing was caused by the circulation of handwritten tracts.
    • The popularity of Nathaniel Bacon's uprising was due to tracts questioning Berkeley's competence.
    • Berkeley's oppression of the Rebellion was well documented.
    • The idea of printing in the southern colonies was revived after Berkeley's death.
    • Although the next governor of the colony forbade William Nuthead from completing a single project, he set up shop in 1682.
    • It wasn't until William Parks opened his printing shop in 1726 that the local trade in printing and books was stable.
  • New England had a different print culture.
    • From the beginning, Puritans had a re spect for print.
    • The foundations of Stephen Daye's first print shop were shaky because New England's authors were content to publish in London.
    • The printers usually made their money from printing sheets, not books.
    • Daye was awarded 140 acres of land because of the significance of his printing.
    • The first Bible to be printed in America was published in 1660 by Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson.
    • The Eliot Bible was printed in the local dialect of the local Algonquin tribes.
  • Philadelphia overtook Boston in 1770 as the center of colonial printing.
    • Philadelphia's rise as the printing capital of the colonies began with the arrival of Benjamin Franklin, a scholar and businessman, in 1723, as well as waves of German immigrants who created a demand for a German-language press.
  • Benjamin Franklin and David Hall changed the book trade in addition to creating public learning ini printers, such as the Library Company and the Academy of Philadelphia.
  • Philadelphia had newspapers, pamphlets, and books for sale.
  • The debate on religious expression continued into the 18th century.
    • Increase Mather is the most famous minister.
    • He said to test their faith against the challenges of America and win.
    • The descendants of the first settlers were worried that their faith had suffered because they had been born in well established colonies.
    • The colonists were looking for a renewed religious experience.
    • The result was known as the Great Awakening.
  • The Great Awakening looks like a unified movement with hindsight.
  • In all of these communities, the same need to strip their lives of worldly concerns was discussed.
    • It was a contradiction in form.
    • People were encouraged to find a personal relationship with God by preachers.
  • There were signs of religious revival in the church.
    • The Puritans shared the faith of a theologian named Edward.
    • He believed in the idea of predestination, in which God decided who would be saved and who would be damned.
    • However, he was worried that his congregation had stopped searching their souls and were just doing good works to prove they were saved.
    • He preached against worldly sins and called for his congregation to look inward for signs of God's saving grace.
    • In the winter of 1734, the sermons sent his congregation into convulsions.
    • There were known sinners in the community.
    • Half of the six hundred person congregation experienced physical symptoms over the next six months.
    • The work of his revival was shared in a pamphlet.
  • In the next decade, the spirit of revival was spread by the preachers.
    • The preachers brought with them a new religious experience.
    • They abandoned traditional sermons in favor of outside meetings where they could whip the congregation into an emotional frenzy to reveal evidence of saving grace.
    • Many religious leaders were suspicious of the enthusiasm and message of these revivals.
  • George Whitefield was the most famous preacher.
    • The only type of faith that pleased God was sincere.
    • The established churches encouraged apathy.
    • The Christian World is not awake.
    • A loud voice can awaken them.
    • He would be that voice.
    • Whitefield was a former actor who preached with a simple message.
  • Everyone was invited to be born again by Whitefield.
    • He traveled from New York to South Carolina to convert people.
  • There is a monkey and jester's staff in the right-hand corner of the image.
  • The impact this rhetoric could have was recorded by a farmer who saw that his righteousness would not save him.
    • The number of people trying to hear Whitefield's message was so large that he preached at the edges of cities.
    • In one case there were over twenty thousand people in Philadelphia.
    • Whitefield and the other preachers made the revivals popular.
  • The religious revivals were a casualty of the preachers' success.
    • As preachers became more experimental, they lost many people.
  • They had to dance naked in circles at night in order to be saved.
    • They could burn the books he didn't like.
    • It was shown that revivalism had gone wrong when there was a divide between "New Lights" and "Old Lights" in the 1740s and 1750s.
  • The religious revivals had a huge impact on America.
    • People were encouraged to question the world around them.
    • This idea created a language of individualism that promised to change everything else.
    • The call for independence reappeared in the language of individualism provided by the Great Awakening.
    • The groundwork was laid for a more republican society after America's revolution.
    • Society did not change quickly.
    • It would take a lot of conflict to change colonial life.
  • Thirty-seven of them were French and Native Americans, who were at war with Britain for seven years.
    • These wars were not fought by European soldiers.