In this series of videos we will not look specifically at how the early Industrial Revolution transformed antebellum America but rather focus more on how Americans reacted to these changes, some embracing them and others rejecting them. We will look at things like art, literature and religion, among others.
By the end of the antebellum age you begin to see the development of a full-fledged American literature
Early steam-powered press meant more books published and increased literacy
Unitarianism
Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Walden Pond
Walt Whitman
Washington Irving and Rip Van Winkle
James Fenimore Cooper and the Last of the Mohicans (recently remade into a movie starring Daniel Day Lewis)
Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter (recently remade into a movie starring Demi Moore)
Herman Melville and Moby Dick
The antebellum Industrial Revolution led to a celebration of the natural world with the growth of landscape painters
Portrait painting typical of earlier periods
Typical landscape painting depicting nature as mystic and beautiful
“Picturesque”
“Garden Park”
“Claude Glass”
“Sublime”
Thomas Cole
Course of Empire” #1
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Brook Farm
George Ripley
Shaker Movement
Shaker Founder: Ann Lee
Shaker Commune
Shakers: God as duel person, male and female
Oneida Community
John Humphrey Noyes
Doctrine of “Complex Marriage”
Joseph Smith
Early Mormon converts
Mormon temple, Nauvoo, IL
Brigham Young
Mormon migration westward
Mormon temple, Salt Lake City, Utah
Mormon alphabet
In the antebellum industrial age as intellectuals and writers stressed different options for society – different and alternative lifestyles – others stressed active reform of society. They decided to stay inside the existing industrial society and try to change or mold it to improve it.
Women’s rights were a major focus for some antebellum reformers
New York Female Reform Society, which later expanded into the American Female Reform Society
Soon many women began to focus on America’s social institutions – most notably asylums, hospitals and jails
Dorothea Dix
Education reform
Horace Mann
Early Normal School
Catharine Beecher
Treatise on Domestic Economy by Catharine Beecher
Oberlin College in Ohio was first college to accept women
Of course many women soon focused on gaining political and economic rights, the beginning of a long struggle for equality. Here is shown a cartoon depicting women running a court trial
Margaret Fuller and Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (young and old)
Susan B. Anthony (young and old)
Connection between disease and natural world
Sylvester Graham
Sylvester Graham’s crackers
Beginnings of osteopathic and chiropractic medicine
The presumed healing power of hot spring waters led to a number of resorts