American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism

A New York Times bestselling historian examines how demagoguery and the populism it inspires—for good and ill—is embedded in the very soul of our nation.

In November 1739, the American colonies felt an earthquake. It arrived not in the form of a natural disaster, but with a twenty-five-year-old preacher, George Whitefield. He had come to the New World to tell his listeners to repent their sins and be reborn in Christ, to reject the dead teachings of their unredeemed ministers, and to support...