Jonathan Edwards Influence On American History

This week our studies focused on two major topics, looking back on American history focusing on colonial times while the country was in its infancy and our forefathers dreams of the new world had not come into fruition. The Great awakening, and the Atlantic slave trade each had profound impacts on America and shaping history in general. The movement that was the great awakening swept through Europe, and especially the American colonies. During the Great Awakening an influential revivalist teacher by the name Jonathan Edwards played a crucial role by shaping the first revivals. Edwards’s sermon sinners in the hands of an angry God taught that the horrors of hell await those who are lost to sin. For example, Edwards states “ He is not only able to cast wicked men into hell, but he can most easily do it. Sometimes an earthly prince meets with a great deal of Difficulty to subdue a Rebel, that has found
Before this weeks study I knew the Atlantic slave trade had a wide reach but the slave trade database brought my understanding to a new level. An unfathomable number of lives were loss and families torn about by lowering a human being to nothing more than an animal or property. The lives of the slaves were seen as disposable and many did not even survive the voyage by sea. Through our study of the Trans-Atlantic database I was able to learn how far the slave trade stretched and the number of human beings were taken and imprisoned to work while being tortured mentally and physically against their will paints a bleak picture of what this period in history was like by mans moral standards. “It is difficult to believe in the first decade of the twenty-first century that just over two centuries ago, for those European’s who thought about the issue, the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was morally indistinguishable from shipping textiles, wheat, or even sugar.” (Eltis,