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 the 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 his many holy endeavors. The Great Awakening peaked and then collapsed, but it had a profound impact in reshaping the American mind. The voices of dissent left the churches and went into the streets, and aimed their rancor at a new target: the ruling power of Great Britain. And so what began as a revolution fought over words and gospel mutated into one fought with riots and violence, until it eventually exploded in to war. This book tells the story of that transformation, and the way a firebrand English preacher incited Americans to rebel against more than a century of tradition, and set a precedent for the kind of galvanizing agitator who is still with us today--the American Demagogue. Though almost three centuries have passed, the themes remain the same--anger, grievance, dissension, self-promotion, and social turmoil--as the tide of populism continues to rise and fall.