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An Age of Reforms. 1821 – 1855. Introduction. Challenges to traditional values & institutions Social injustice & instability The emergence of mvmts. to “reform” the nation Women’s rights, school reform, abolition Optimistic faith in human nature. Religion & Revivalism. Decay of piety - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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1821 – 1855
Challenges to traditional values & institutions
Social injustice & instability
The emergence of mvmts. to “reform” the nation
Women’s rights, school reform, abolition
Optimistic faith in human nature
Decay of piety
Deism – “rational” religious doctrines
Universalism & Unitarianism – salvation was available to all
Decline in commitment to organized churches & denominations
Most Ams. continued to hold strong religious beliefs
Second Great Awakening (~1801)
Efforts to fight spread of religious rationalism
Methodism founded by John Wesley
Revivals – religious gatherings designed to awaken religious faith
Combined a more active piety w/a belief in a God whose grace could be attained through faith & good works
Individual & social reform were possible
Influential leaders – Charles Finney & Lyman Beecher
John Lewis Krimmel, Black People's Prayer Meeting, watercolor, ca. 1811, depicting a Methodist service in Philadelphia
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)
Romanticism
Am. artistic mvmt.
Valued strong feeling & mystical intuition over calm rationality
Appealed to feelings & intuitions of ordinary people
Innate love of goodness, truth, & beauty
Washington Irving
James Fennimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans)
Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)
Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (Scarlet Letter)
Edgar Allen Poe
Philosophical & literary mvmt.
Emphasized living a simple life
Celebrated truth found in nature & in personal emotion & imagination
Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Nature” & “Self-Reliance)
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
Experimental groups who lived together & tried to create a perfect place
Brook Farm in West Roxbury, MA
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Robert Owen & New Harmony (IN) 1825
Individual freedom vs. demands of communal society
Oneida community in upstate NY rejected traditional notions of family & marriage, founded by John Humphrey Noyes
Shakers commitment to complete celibacy, founded in late 1774 by Mother Ann Lee in England
Reform mvmts. were mostly led by women
Temperance
Education
Care of the poor, the handicapped, & the mentally ill
Treatment of criminals
Rights of women
Protestant revivalism – crusade against personal immorality
Temperance – crusade against drunkenness
Am. Temperance Society (1826) became a major national mvmt.
Education
Effort to produce a system of universal public education
Horace Mann – education was a way to protect democracy
Principle of tax-supported elementary schools est. in every st. by 1850s
Quality of public ed. varied widely
Institutions to help disabled
Rehabilitation
Prison & hospital reform
Mental health reform
Dorthea Dix
Early opposition to slavery
Colonization – effort to resettle African Ams. in Africa or Caribbean
American Colonization Society (1817)
Liberia est. 1821
The Liberator (1831)
Opponents of slavery should talk about its damage
Demand immediate, unconditional, universal abolition of slavery
Extension of all the rights of Am. citizenship
American Antislavery Society (1833)
Frederick Douglass founded North Star
Abolitionism divided, growing radicalism of Garrison
Division w/in Am. Antislavery Society (1840)
Underground railroad
Personal liberty laws (TBJ vs. FSL)
SCOTUS (1842)
Liberty Party (1840) stood for “free soil”
1st Am. feminist mvmt.
Lucretia Mott
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Dorothea Dix
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Drawing parallels between plight of women & slaves
Seneca Falls Convention (NY, 1848)
Adopted “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions”
Sojourner Truth
Family as an institution, inspired new conceptions of its role in Am. Society
Traditional inequalities remained
Oberlin College (OH, 1837)
Mt. Holyoke College (MA, 1837)
“Cult of domesticity” – new domestic ideology
Women as guardians of “domestic virtues”
Custodians of morality
Detached from public world
Had real meaning for relatively affluent women