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 Paul's Cathedral, seat of the Church of England's bishop of London, is visible on the horizon at right. Whitefield's 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.