Reverend George Whitefield

Wearing a shoulder-length wig and clerical garb and clutching a Bible in his left hand, the itinerant Anglican minister Reverend George Whitefield is shown preaching in Moorfields, one of the last pieces of open land in early eighteenth-century London. The dome of Saint Pauls Cathedral, seat of the Church of Englands bishop of London, is visible on the horizon at right. Whitefields preaching triggered the first Great Awakening in America, a religious revival that eventually led to the disestablishment of the Church of England in the colonies, a rupture that took place during the American Revolution.