This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Cecil M. Robeck Jr.'s history of the 1906 Azusa Street Revival, the Los Angeles meetings led by William Seymour that give the modern global Pentecostal movement its usual point of origin, combines archival documentation, contemporary newspaper accounts and participant testimony rather than retelling the revival as an unexamined origin legend. Robeck writes as a historian who is also a Pentecostal minister and scholar, holding the events to ordinary historical scrutiny while working from an insider's familiarity with the tradition's own sources.
That documented founding episode matters for a movement entry generally, not only for Pentecostalism's own entry, because it shows how a movement's identity can trace to a specific, dated, geographically located event with named participants, William Seymour foremost among them, rather than to a vague or gradual drift with no clear beginning. An entry can therefore distinguish, where the documented record allows it, a movement with a genuinely traceable founding moment from one that emerged more diffusely across a longer, less clearly bounded period.
Robeck's own study states its honest limit plainly: it centers on the revival's founding years and does not attempt a full history of Pentecostalism's subsequent global spread and doctrinal diversification into denominations, Charismatic renewal within older churches, and independent movements worldwide, which needs separate, broader sources to cover.