1. The Antebellum Period An Age of Reform 1820-1860

2. Deism Rational thought and observation dictate daily actions
God (“The Supreme Architect”) created the Universe, but not a part of day-to day life
Resulted from the Age of Enlightenment

3. The Second Great Awakening
Reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the Revolution
Calvinism (Puritan beliefs) attacked the liberal ideas of society and other Protestant churches
New Calvinism: allowed free will in salvation
Charles Finney: “The Father of Modern Revivalism”
Allowed women to pray in mixed meetings
Extemporaneous preaching
Publicly censured sinners in sermons
Coined the term “burned-over district”

4. The Second Great Awakening and Reform
Only in northern states did the movement play a part in reform.
Massachusetts to Ohio

5. South and New Frontier South and New Frontier
Baptist and Methodist circuit preachers
Outdoor revival and camp meetings
Largest Protestant denominations by 1850

7. Millenialism
Belief that the world would end with the second coming of Christ
William Miller predicted it would be October 21, 1844
Continued as the Seventh-Day Adventists

8. Mormons Church of the Latter-Day Saints
Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830
Book of Mormon: traced the connection between the Native Americans and the lost tribes of Israel
NY-OH-MO-IL
Smith was murdered by a local mob
Under leadership of Brigham Young, the group migrated to Utah
Cooperative social organization aided survival
polygamous

9. Communal Experiments Shakers 6000 members by the 1840s
Held property in common
Men and women kept separately
Forbade marriage and sexual relations
Died out by the mid-1900s

10. The Shakers

11. New Harmony (Indiana) Secular Utopian socialism
An answer to the problems of industrialization

12. Oneida Community (New York)
Started by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848
Social and economic equality
Shared property and marriage partners
Planned reproduction and communal child-rearing
Prospered economically by producing silverware

13. Brook Farm Massachusetts
Communal experiment started by Protestant minister George Ripley
“a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor”

14. Architecture Reflected democracy of ancient Athens
Classical Greek styles
Columned facades

15. Arts and Literature
Genre Painting: portraying everyday life of ordinary people
Hudson River School of art: scenes of nature

16. Literature Nationalistic Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville: Moby Dick

17. Transcendentalism
Romantic movement in art and literature that stressed intuition and feelings and the study of nature
Comparable movement in Europe
Jo March and Transcendentalism

18. Ralph Waldo Emerson Nationalistic
Wanted to create a new American culture
Spiritual over material
Stressed self-reliance and independence
Critic of slavery in the 1850s
Expressed philosophy of transcendentalism in Nature
Wrote the “The American Scholar”
Oliver Wendell Holmes called it “America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

19. Henry David Thoreau Lived by himself for 2 years in the woods
Nature revealed to him the essential truths about life and the universe
Walden (1854)
“On Civil Disobedience”: advocate of non-violent protest
Inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King

20. Walt Whitman
Provides a transition between transcendentalism and realism
Wrote temperance novel, Franklin Evans
Leaves of Grass was an attempt to reach out to the common man through an American “epic”
Supporter of the Wilmot Proviso, although he later believed the abolitionist movement was a threat to American democracy.

21. Temperance
1826: Protestant ministers founded the American Temperance Union
1820: 5 gallons of hard liquor per person in 1820
Overshadowed by the abolitionist movement

22. Public Asylums
Increasing number of criminals, emotionally disturbed, and poor
Set up state supported prisons, mental hospitals (Dorothea Dix), and poorhouses

23. Public Education Free common schools
Horace Mann: worked for compulsory attendance, longer school year, and better teacher education
1840s: tax supported schools spread to other states
Moral education (hard work, punctuality, and sobriety): William Holmes McGuffey
Higher education: several (Mt. Holyoke and Oberlin) schools began to admit women

24. Robert Owen and Socialism
Social reformer and one of the founders of socialism and the cooperative movement
People are products of their environment
Religion is based on imagination and makes people weak

25. The Women’s Rights Movement
Industrialization reduced the economic benefit of children (families reduced from 7.04 in 1800 to 5.42 in 1830).
Women had the time to devote to religious and moral organizations

26. Origins
Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn’t like that men opposed their antislavery activities
Seneca Falls Convention (1848)
Declaration of Sentiments
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony led movement for equal voting, legal and property rights

27. Cult of Domesticity
Men and women’s roles in society defined by the urban, middle-class
Men: responsible for economics and politics
Women: home and children
Moral leaders
Educators of children