A Brief Timeline of English and American Reformed History

This timeline gathers selected people, confessions, institutions, and events that help readers trace the development of English and American Reformed history. It is not exhaustive, but it gives a broad path through the Reformation, Puritan and Baptist confessional history, colonial New England, Black Protestant witnesses, and later Reformed theology.

Date	Person / Event	Significance
1491-1547	Henry VIII	English king under whom England broke ecclesiastically with Rome.
1534	Act of Supremacy / English break with Rome	Parliament recognizes the king as supreme head of the Church of England. This is not yet the mature English Reformation, but it creates the institutional break in which it develops.
1537-1553	Edward VI	Protestant reform advances considerably during Edward’s reign, especially through Cranmer and other reformers.
c. 1535-1603	Thomas Cartwright	Cambridge theologian and leading advocate of Presbyterian and Puritan church reform in England.
1570s-1590s	Cartwright and English Presbyterian reform	Cartwright’s advocacy of further reform brings deprivation, controversy, exile and eventually imprisonment.
1588-1649	John Winthrop	English Puritan who becomes a leading founder and governor of Massachusetts Bay.
1590-1657	William Bradford	Separatist, Mayflower passenger, governor of Plymouth Colony and author of Of Plymouth Plantation.
1604-1690	John Eliot	Puritan minister, missionary and translator of the Bible into the Massachusett language.
1606	Scrooby congregation forms	Separatist congregation associated with John Robinson, William Brewster and William Bradford.
1607	Jamestown founded	First permanent English settlement in North America.
1608	Scrooby congregation flees England	The Separatists escape persecution and relocate to the Netherlands.
1609	Pilgrim community settles at Leiden	The future Plymouth community establishes itself at Leiden, not yet in America.
1612-1672	Anne Bradstreet	Puritan poet who becomes the first published poet of England’s North American colonies.
1619	First documented Africans arrive in Virginia	“Twenty and odd” Africans arrive at Point Comfort in English Virginia.
1620	Mayflower voyage	The Leiden/Pilgrim community sends settlers across the Atlantic.
Nov. 1620	Mayflower Compact	The settlers covenant to form a civil body politic and submit to laws enacted for the general good.
1621	Plymouth harvest celebration	Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag participate in the harvest gathering later remembered as the “First Thanksgiving.”
Jan. 3, 1624	William Tucker baptized	An early recorded baptism of a child of African descent in English Virginia.
1629	Massachusetts Bay receives royal charter	The Massachusetts Bay Company receives the charter underlying the major Puritan migration and colony.
1630	Great Migration / Massachusetts Bay settlement	Winthrop and a large Puritan migration arrive in New England.
1631	John Eliot begins ministry at Roxbury	Eliot begins the pastorate from which his missionary and translation work develops.
1636	Harvard College founded	Massachusetts establishes the college that becomes central to New England ministerial and intellectual life.
1639-1723	Increase Mather	Puritan minister, theologian, author and Harvard president.
1643-1649	Westminster Assembly	English and Scottish divines undertake the work that produces the great Westminster standards.
1646	Westminster Confession of Faith	Westminster’s principal confession is completed.
1647	Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms	The Assembly completes its catechetical standards.
1658	Savoy Declaration	English Congregationalists adapt Westminster’s Reformed theology to Congregational church government.
1616-1683	John Owen	English Puritan, Congregationalist, and one of the major Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century.
1662	Great Ejection	Around two thousand ministers refuse conformity under the restored Church of England and leave their livings.
1663	Eliot’s Algonquian Bible	Complete Bible translated into Massachusett and printed at Cambridge, the first complete Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere.
1663-1728	Cotton Mather	New England Congregational minister, theologian, historian and prolific author.
1628-1688	John Bunyan	English Nonconformist preacher and writer.
1678	The Pilgrim’s Progress	Bunyan publishes one of the most influential works of Protestant imaginative literature.
1623-1687	Francis Turretin	Genevan Reformed theologian and leading representative of Reformed scholasticism.
1679-1685	Institutes of Elenctic Theology	Turretin publishes his major theological work in three installments.
1689	Second London Baptist Confession	Particular Baptists publish the famous 1689 edition of their confession, substantially sharing the Reformed theological architecture of Westminster and Savoy while expressing Baptist ecclesiology.
1703-1758	Jonathan Edwards	New England Congregational minister, revival preacher and major Reformed theologian.
1711-c. 1786	Jupiter Hammon	Enslaved New Yorker, Christian poet and one of the earliest published Black American writers.
1714-1770	George Whitefield	Calvinistic Methodist evangelist and central figure in the transatlantic evangelical awakening.
c. 1730s-1740s	First Great Awakening	Transatlantic evangelical revival associated with Edwards, Whitefield and others.
July 8, 1741	Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God	Edwards preaches the famous sermon at Enfield, Connecticut.
1753-1784	Phillis Wheatley Peters	Christian poet whose published work places a Black woman prominently within eighteenth-century Anglo-American letters.
1753-1833	Lemuel Haynes	Revolutionary veteran, Congregational minister and Calvinistic theologian, the central namesake of the project.
1759-1833	William Wilberforce	British evangelical statesman and leading parliamentary opponent of the slave trade.
1773	Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects	Wheatley’s landmark collection is published in London.
1775-1783	American Revolution	The thirteen colonies fight for independence from Great Britain.
July 4, 1776	United States declares independence	Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence.
Sept. 24, 1786	Jupiter Hammon’s Address to the Negroes	Hammon addresses Black New Yorkers on Christian faith, conduct, liberty and slavery.
c. 1790-1840	Second Great Awakening	Large and diverse American revival movement. Unlike the First Awakening, it should not be presented as uniformly Calvinistic.
1795-1858	Samuel Eli Cornish	Presbyterian minister, abolitionist, editor and pioneering Black journalist.
1797-1847	Theodore Sedgwick Wright	Presbyterian minister, abolitionist and one of the earliest Black graduates of an American theological seminary.
1797-1878	Charles Hodge	Princeton theologian and one of the principal representatives of nineteenth-century American Presbyterian theology.
1805	Haynes preaches against Universalism	Haynes delivers Universal Salvation, a Very Ancient Doctrine, with Some Account of the Life and Character of Its Author.
1807	First African Presbyterian Church	Historic Black Presbyterian congregation established in Philadelphia.
1807-1870	James W. C. Pennington	Presbyterian minister, theologian, abolitionist, historian and author.
1827-1888	James Petigru Boyce	Reformed Baptist theologian and founding president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Mar. 16, 1827	Freedom’s Journal	Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm launch the first Black-owned and operated newspaper in the United States. Its pages also preserve the literary, religious, domestic, and humorous world now being recovered.
1833	New Hampshire Confession	Influential American Baptist confession later important within Black Baptist denominational life.
1834-1892	Charles H. Spurgeon	Particular Baptist preacher whose sermons circulate internationally.
1836-1918	A. A. Hodge	Presbyterian theologian and successor to Charles Hodge at Princeton.
1836-1921	Augustus Hopkins Strong	Baptist theologian later explicitly used by Black Baptist writers including J. T. Brown.
1845-1928	Matthew Anderson	Black Presbyterian pastor, author and institution-builder in Philadelphia.
1847-1903	Lewis Johnston Jr.	Black Covenanter minister, educated at Geneva and Allegheny and ordained in the RPCNA.
1847-1928	Samuel Jackson Fisher	Black Presbyterian minister, educator and prolific author.
1850-1937	Francis J. Grimké	Presbyterian pastor, theologian and writer with a substantial surviving sermon and literary corpus.
1851-1921	B. B. Warfield	Princeton theologian and major representative of confessional Presbyterian theology.
1854-1921	Herman Bavinck	Dutch Reformed theologian and author of Reformed Dogmatics.
1858-1917	W. Bishop Johnson	Black Baptist pastor, editor and denominational leader; important witness to the Calvinistic identity of nineteenth-century Black Baptists.
1859-1924	E. C. Morris	Baptist minister, writer and major early National Baptist leader.
1859-1937	Henry Ossawa Tanner	Black American painter whose Christian art belongs naturally within this broader cultural inheritance.
1861-1865	American Civil War	The defining military crisis over Union and slavery.
Jan. 1, 1863	Emancipation Proclamation	Declares enslaved people in designated areas under rebellion free. Not equivalent to nationwide abolition.
Dec. 6, 1865	Thirteenth Amendment ratified	Slavery is constitutionally abolished throughout the United States except as punishment for crime.
1863-1951	Henry L. McCrorey	Presbyterian minister, educator and longtime leader of Biddle University/Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte.
1865-1927	William Henry Sheppard	Black Presbyterian missionary, explorer, writer and witness against atrocities in the Congo.
1874-1958	Joseph Winthrop Holley	Presbyterian minister and educator; founder of the institution that becomes Albany State University.
1889-1986	William Lloyd Imes	Presbyterian minister, educator and writer.
1895	National Baptist Convention organized	Major consolidation in Black Baptist institutional life; becomes the denominational setting for many figures and theological sources being recovered.
late 1890s-early 1900s	The Negro Baptist Pulpit and National Baptist literature	Black Baptist ministers publish systematic treatments of regeneration, salvation, perseverance, atonement and other doctrines.
1900-1990	Joseph H. Jackson	Baptist pastor, theologian, author and longtime president of the National Baptist Convention.
early 20th c.	J. T. Brown, Theological Kernels	Black Baptist theological work explicitly interacting with Augustine, Charles Hodge, A. H. Strong, and disputes over human ability, regeneration and the will.
1939-2017	R. C. Sproul	Reformed theologian and teacher who popularizes historic Reformed theology for modern audiences.
1969-2025	Voddie Baucham	Reformed Baptist pastor, theologian and author.