1. 2nd Great Awakening and Utopias

2. US in 1840

3. ECONOMIC CHANGE Population growth (labor, consumers)
Expansion of Transportation (effect)
Growth of Industry (new inventions, manufacturing, factory system)
Growth of Corporations (investment)
Changes in farming (effects)

4. Fast Pace of Change Leads To Concerns About Society
Search for more meaning in life
Reaction against the Enlightenment (scientific rationalism) of the 1820’s & 1830’s
Industrial process creates reaction against “mechanical” work/society

5. 1. The Second Great Awakening
“Spiritual Reform From Within” [Religious Revivalism]
Social Reforms & Redefining the Ideal of Equality
Temperance
Education
Abolitionism
Asylum & Penal Reform
Women’s Rights

6. “The Benevolent Empire”: 1825 - 1846

7. The “Burned-Over” District in Upstate New York

8. Second Great Awakening Revival Meeting

9. “soul-shaking” conversion
Charles G. Finney (1792 – 1895)
The ranges of tents, the fires, reflecting light…; the candles and lamps illuminating the encampment; hundreds moving to and fro…;the preaching, praying, singing, and shouting,… like the sound of many waters, was enough to swallow up all the powers of contemplation.
“soul-shaking” conversion
R1-2

10. The Mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)
1823  Golden Tablets
1830  Book of Mormon
1844  Murdered in Carthage, IL
Joseph Smith ( )

11. The Mormon “Trek”

12. Shaker Meeting

13. Shaker Simplicity & Utility

14. 2. Utopian Communities – Goal is to create ideal societies

15. Demands of Community Life
Difficulties in Secular Utopian Communities
Individual Freedom
Demands of Community Life
spontaneity
self-fulfillment
discipline
organizational hierarchy

16. John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886)
The Oneida Community New York, 1848
Humans were no longer obliged to follow the moral rules of the past.
all residents married to each other.
carefully regulated “free love.”
John Humphrey Noyes ( )

17. “Village of Cooperation”
Robert Owen ( )
Utopian Socialist
“Village of Cooperation”

18. Original Plans for New Harmony, IN

19. New Harmony, IN

20. Transcendentalist and Romanticism in American History
America’s First Notable Writers

21. Transcendental Beliefs
Intuition, not reason, is the highest human faculty
Simplicity is the path to spiritual greatness (rejected materialism)
Nature is a source of truth & inspiration
Believed humanity is godlike and saw a world in which only good existed
Everyone can rise above (transcend) evil
Laws and rules are not important
Non-conformity, individuality, and self-reliance A man should choose for himself what is right and wrong by trusting his intuition

22. The Influence of Romanticism
Self-examination
The celebration of individualism
Extolling the beauties of nature and humankind
Focus on the emotional and intuitive, rather than the rational

23. The Oversoul “In the faces of men and women I see God” – Walt Whitman
Nature
The Oversoul
“The groves were God’s first temples”
– William Cullen Bryant
Individual
God
“In the faces of men and women I see God” – Walt Whitman

24. The Transcendentalists
American Transcendentalism began with the formation in 1836 of the Transcendental Club in Boston
Magazine: The Dial
Brook Farm: communal living experiment
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Margaret Fuller
Henry David Thoreau
Bronson Alcott

25. Brook Farm West Roxbury, MA
George Ripley ( )
Brook Farm West Roxbury, MA

26. Major Transcendentalist Works
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nature” 1836
“Self-Reliance” 1841
Henry David Thoreau
Walden 1854
“Civil Disobedience” 1847

27. Contemplate
“…the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude…” – Emerson
Is greatness nonconformity???
Does simplicity lead to happiness?
Does the natural world lead to greatness and happiness or can that be found artificially?

28. A Transcendentalist Critic: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Their pursuit of the ideal led to a distorted view of human nature and possibilities: * The Blithedale Romance
One should accept the world as an imperfect place: * Scarlet Letter * House of the Seven Gables