The treatment of late nineteenth-century revivalism by historians of American Christianity has generally been rather unsystematic, despite the inclusion of the great revivals in survey histories like William G. McLoughun's Modern Revivalism and Bernard Weisberger's They Gathered at the River. There have been a few good biographies of major evangelists, such as James Findlay's of Dwight L. Moody. Early nineteenth-century revivalism has received a larger share of attention because of its close connections with social reform movements, which seem to be more interesting to liberally- inclined historians than do the later revivalists with specifically conversionist aims. From more “conservative” religious scholars, understandably, the treatment of such material has tended to be more expository and theological than analytical. In all, the revivalist tradition after 1850 has been given rather short shrift as representing only a backwash of American religion, perhaps associated with lower socioeconomic classes or marginal groups. That, unfortunately, has left us with a wide gap between event and explanation when the late sixties and seventies brought a resurgence of conservative and “Spirit-filled” evangelicalism among middle-class Christians, and when 1976 revealed a strong evangelical strain even in the political arena.

During the early nineteenth century Americans developed a new consciousness of children and of childhood as a stage of life. While it may be hyperbolic to term this event the “discovery of the child,” it seems clear that nineteenth-century Americans saw children and adolescents in very different ways than did their ancestors. Adults began to recognize the characteristics of childhood which separated children from themselves and to perceive that psychological and emotional changes accompanied the physical experience of puberty. Thus the nineteenth century saw the beginning of attempts to understand children on their own terms and to elaborate a theory of that stage later termed “adolescence.”