1. Second Great Awakening
American commitment to organized religion is weakened.
Preachers of this time rejected the Calvinistic belief that God predetermined ones salvation or damnation ( heaven vs. hell)
Emphasized individual responsibility for seeking salvation and that one could improve themselves and society
Began in Kentucky on the frontier
Circuit-riding ministers
Mainly Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterian
People must readmit God and Christ into their daily lives; all people could attain grace through faith
Revivalism- a tendency or desire to revive a former custom or practice (Religion in this case)

2. American Writers
Romanticism: feeling over reason, inner spiritually over external rules, nature over environments created by humans
Transcendentalism: overcome the limits of the mind and let their soul reach out to embrace the beauty of the universe
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Self-Reliance (transcendentalism)
Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Emily Dickinson: American poet
Walt Whitman: O Captain, My Captain, Leaves of Grass

3. American Writers: James Fenimore Cooper
The Last of the Mohicans
First American novelist

4. Reformers and their Reforms
Lyman Beecher- Presbyterian Minister
Temperance
limit the amount of alcohol (moderation)
Alcohol can lead to the downfall of man
Horace Mann
Father of education
Public education
State board of education

5. Utopia Perfect society Communist
Brook Farm- Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance”
Oneida-upstate NY
“Complex Marriage”
Shakers- communal ownership of good
Strict separation of the sexes in both work and life

6. Reformers: Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Advocated for women’s suffrage
Seneca Falls Convention: wrote the Declaration of Sentiments; all men and women were equal
Launched the modern women’s rights movement
Some changes did happen but overshadowed by slavery