Wrestling with the eternal mystery of human agency, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Euro-Americans built cultures in which the idea of self-making could begin to take hold. Along the way they developed new mindsets about self-fashioning, ambition, the value of work, materialist consumption, and whether individuals or communities were the proper beneficiaries of people’s improvement. The eighteenth-century’s prominent cultural movements—the Enlightenment’s intellectual developments and the First Great Awakening’s religious revivals—were both context for and products of the growing legitimacy of human agency. In very different ways, their participants and storytellers engaged in transitions that made it possible to imagine self-making. Cotton Mather and other religious leaders struggled with witch trials, epidemics, and spiritual challenges, including how to respond to the Great Awakening’s popular enthusiasms. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin explored science and politics, invented useful devices and civic institutions. Uncertainties about human agency continued, but there was no doubt about the responsibility for self-improvement to serve God and community.