Second Great Awakening
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50 free Second Great Awakening trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Second Great Awakening was the wave of Protestant revivals that swept the United States from the 1790s into the 1840s. It began with outdoor preaching on the frontier, where thousands of settlers gathered for days at a time, and it changed the country far beyond the church door. It reshaped which denominations Americans belonged to, gave rise to several new faiths, and sent converts into campaigns against drinking and slavery and for schools, asylums and women's rights. This quiz covers the whole story. You will meet the preachers who rode the backcountry and packed city churches, the places where the revivals ran hottest, the beliefs that set the movement apart from the older Calvinism, the prophets and communes that grew up around it, and the missionaries and reformers it inspired. Questions run from the well known to the properly obscure, and every answer comes with a short explanation. It suits US history and APUSH students revising the antebellum era, teachers building a unit review, and anyone curious about how a religious revival helped set the agenda for nineteenth-century America.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which future president beat frontier Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright in an 1846 race for Congress?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln won the Illinois race partly because some voters disliked Cartwright mixing religion with politics. Others were put off by the preacher's vehemence against alcohol.
Q 02Which snack is named for an 1830s Presbyterian minister who preached temperance, vegetarianism and whole-grain bread?
Graham cracker
Graham cracker recalls Sylvester Graham, often called the Father of Vegetarianism in America. Followers and entrepreneurs sold flour, bread and crackers inspired by his teachings.
Q 03In 1806, Williams College students began America's foreign missions movement while sheltering from a storm under what?
A haystack
A haystack sheltered the five students, who had met to discuss the spiritual welfare of the people of Asia. Within four years, some of them had set up a national board to send missionaries overseas.
Q 04Which 1801 revival led by Barton W. Stone drew as many as 20,000 settlers to rural Bourbon County?
Cane Ridge
Cane Ridge may have drawn nearly a tenth of the state's recorded 1800 population over one week. Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist ministers all took part in the services.
Q 05Western New York saw so many waves of revival in the early 1800s that it earned which lasting nickname?
Burned-over district
Burned-over district implied a region set ablaze with spiritual fervor. A revivalist's 1876 memoir called it a 'burnt district', and a 1950 history of the region fixed the longer name.
Q 06Which young man from Palmyra, New York said an angel led him to golden plates, founding the Latter Day Saint movement?
Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830, describing it as an English translation of those plates. He spent the following decade sending out missionaries.
Q 07Which lawyer-turned-evangelist led the 1830–31 Rochester revival that inspired others across the Second Great Awakening?
Charles Finney
Charles Finney apprenticed as a lawyer before he turned to preaching. His innovations included having women pray aloud in mixed gatherings of men and women.
Q 08Which celibate sect, led to America by 'Mother Ann', thrived on revival fervor and became famous for its furniture?
Shakers
Shakers were first called Shaking Quakers for their ecstatic worship. In the wake of the frontier revivals, their missionaries went west and founded new villages there from 1805.
Q 09Which hymn by former slave trader John Newton spread across America during the Second Great Awakening's revivals?
Amazing Grace
Amazing Grace had settled into relative obscurity in England before American revivalists embraced it. In 1835 it was joined to New Britain, the tune it is most often sung to today.
Q 10Which New England island's colorful gingerbread cottages grew from a Methodist summer revival ground founded in 1835?
Martha's Vineyard
Martha's Vineyard worshippers began with nine tents at Wesleyan Grove. In the 1860s and 1870s, families rapidly replaced the canvas with permanent wooden cottages.
Q 11The Second Great Awakening's frontier phase ignited at the Revival of 1800 in Logan County, in which state?
Kentucky
Kentucky's revival began at the Red River Meeting House, a Presbyterian congregation of about twenty-five members led by James McGready.
Q 12What name was given to the multi-day outdoor revivals where thousands of frontier settlers gathered to hear preaching?
Camp meetings
Camp meetings often gave settlers their first encounter with organized religion. They also served as major social venues in thinly populated country.
Q 13Which War of 1812 veteran from Low Hampton, New York convinced thousands that Christ would return by 1844?
William Miller
Q 21Which church, co-founded by visionary Ellen G. White, grew from a movement that expected Christ's return in 1844?
Seventh-day Adventists
Seventh-day Adventists formally organized in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1863, almost two decades after the date their forerunners had awaited.
Q 22Which Ohio college, a stronghold of revivalism and abolition, is the oldest coeducational college in the United States?
Oberlin
Oberlin began admitting Black students in 1835 and women in 1837. Students and townspeople also made it a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Q 23Which Philadelphia preacher, born into slavery, became the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church?
Richard Allen
William Miller rested his forecast on a 2,300-day prophecy in the Book of Daniel. He set it out in a series of sixteen newspaper articles in 1832.
Q 14Second Great Awakening leader Timothy Dwight was a grandson of which fiery preacher of the First Great Awakening?
Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards preached the 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. His daughter Mary was Dwight's mother, so the two awakenings ran in one family.
Q 15Which enslaved Virginia preacher, guided by religious visions and a solar eclipse, led a four-day rebellion in 1831?
Nat Turner
Nat Turner's uprising led state legislatures to require a white man's presence at Black worship services. The laws were a blow to independent congregations born of the revivals.
Q 16Which formerly enslaved New Yorker took a new name in 1843, convinced God had called her to testify in the countryside?
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth became a Christian in 1827 and helped found the Methodist church in Kingston, New York. Her famous speech at an Ohio women's convention came in 1851.
Q 17Which antebellum reformer toured hundreds of jails and almshouses, then lobbied legislatures to build mental asylums?
Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix covered more than 10,000 miles by stagecoach in three years of inspections. During the Civil War she served as the Union's Superintendent of Army Nurses.
Q 18Missionaries fired by the Second Great Awakening sailed to which Pacific islands, where they created a written language?
Hawaii
Hawaii was known to the missionaries as the Sandwich Islands. They adapted the English alphabet to Hawaiian so that they could print a Bible in the islanders' own language.
Q 19Which revivalist, famed for six 1826 sermons against drunkenness, was the father of the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin?
Lyman Beecher
Lyman Beecher raised a remarkable family: over half of his children became writers or ministers. Among them was the minister Henry Ward Beecher.
Q 20What name do historians give October 22, 1844, the day thousands of American believers expected Christ to return?
The Great Disappointment
The Great Disappointment split the movement. One group decided the date had marked not Christ's return but the start of his final work of atonement in heaven.
Richard Allen's Mother Bethel church stands on the oldest parcel of real estate in the United States continuously owned by African Americans.
Q 24Which English-born Methodist bishop rode about 6,000 miles a year to reach settlers on the American frontier?
Francis Asbury
Francis Asbury spent 45 years in America, preaching virtually every day. He also ordained the first Black Methodist minister.
Q 25Which town in revival-swept upstate New York hosted America's first women's rights convention in 1848?
Seneca Falls
Seneca Falls was home to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the meeting with local Quaker women. She read its Declaration of Sentiments aloud in full.
Q 26Which waterway, completed in 1825, brought the boom that left western New York's frontier ripe for revival preachers?
Erie Canal
Erie Canal country was still a frontier where established clergy were scarce, so traveling evangelists won many converts among its self-taught settlers.
Q 27Which utopian commune, notorious for its 'complex marriage', grew into one of the world's largest silverware makers?
Oneida
Oneida was founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes and long lived on animal traps, silk and canned goods. Its silverware manufacturing only began in 1877.
Q 28Second Great Awakening revivalists preached that anyone could choose salvation, breaking with which Calvinist doctrine?
Predestination
Predestination, as set out in the Westminster Confession, held that people could not save themselves and were saved only if God had elected them.
Q 29Which movement began in 1848 when New York's Fox sisters claimed mysterious rapping noises were messages from the dead?
Spiritualism
Spiritualism spread nationwide before Margaretta Fox said in 1888 that the raps were a hoax made by cracking her joints. She later retracted the confession.
Q 30Which state, in 1851, became the first to ban the sale and production of alcohol, a triumph for temperance crusaders?
Maine
Maine's ban was copied so widely that by 1855 twelve more states had passed prohibition laws of their own.