Friday was the last day of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History/Wilderness Education Project seminar with K-12 teachers from the Roanoke, Virginia area. We took colonial and revolutionary Boston by storm! 🙂
See our updates on the previous days of the seminar here:
My final morning lecture focused on the First Great Awakening in Boston. We discussed George Whitefield as the first colonial “celebrity,” Jonathan Edwards’s sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Phillis Wheatley’s poem on Whitefield, Whitefield’s views on slavery, the Old Light-New Light divisions in 18th-century Boston, and the Great Awakening’s impact on colonial higher education.
It was a great week. It was a pleasure to work with Kay Hedrick and Clabe Stone of the Wilderness Education Project and Joe Welch (2018 National History Teacher of the Year) and Connie Lopez-Fink (2018 Tennessee Teacher of the Year) of Gilder-Lehrman. I am always energized by spending time with teachers. I have been working with this group since January and am thankful for the conversations and connections I have been able to make with them over the last six months. These teachers are on the front lines of preserving American democracy, and from what I saw this week they are doing a solid job!
