Dickey’s subject isn’t really Trump or demagoguery per se. Rather, he tells us in graceful prose how eighteenth-century American evangelists held their audiences spellbound with invective, histrionics, bellicosity, and divisiveness—the same techniques employed by one demagogue after another ... Though respectful, Dickey appears less impressed by skeptics such as Chauncy than by Whitefield’s presumed sincerity—and by other radical American evangelists whose exploits, or antics, he recounts at length ... A masterful synthesizer of secondary scholarship, Dickey ends his book with a postscript that turns our attention back to the matter of populism, his real subject (not demagoguery or Donald Trump). As he wrote in the first pages of his book, his intention has been to 'explain the Great Awakening through the lens of populism.' Stoked often by resentment at a status quo regarded as hidebound, elitist, or institutionalist, populism encompasses ideologies of the right as well as the left, though Dickey highlights the salutary implications. For whatever its excesses, the particular brand of revivalist populism he chronicles may resonate today...

Dickey chronicles events and personalities, teases out nuances, and delivers insights briskly and clearly. One critique is that Dickey neither consistently uses the lens of populism to analyze the Great Awakening nor examines how the movement influenced later American demagogues, from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump ... Despite its misleading title, this work remains a thoughtful take on an intriguing period of American history.

Journalist and U.S. historian Dickey enhances his account with illustrations from contemporary sources, which give readers compelling images of this era’s vivid personalities.

The author bases his narrative on mounds of academic histories of the Great Awakening and blends those scholarly sources into a readable account of the Awakening’s turbulent effects on the eve of the American Revolution. Scholars reading the book will know immediately where he’s getting much of his information before they even look at Mr. Dickey’s copious endnotes; the notes even include brief historiographical narratives about the sources on each topic covered ... Mr. Dickey doesn’t break much new ground from a specialist’s perspective, but he packages the academic literature into a sprightly, engaging narrative. It’s as if a gifted history doctoral student finished taking a class on the Great Awakening and went on a leave of absence to write a popular book on what he learned. Indeed, if I had to recommend one introductory book on the Great Awakening, this might be it ... did the Great Awakening cause the Revolution? Mr. Dickey struggles, as Heimert did, to establish a direct connection.