1. U.S. History Chapter 15: New Movements in America Section 1: America’s Spiritual Awakening

2. The Second Great Awakening
Second Great Awakening: movement of Christian renewal that began in the 1790s and became widespread in the U.S. by the 1830s

3. The Second Great Awakening
Charles Grandison Finney: one of the most important leaders of the Second Great Awakening
Experienced a dramatic conversion in 1821 and left his career as a lawyer and began preaching. Speaking in a forceful and direct style, Finney challenged some traditional Protestant beliefs.
Charles Grandison Finney

4. The Second Great Awakening
Finney’s message:
Individuals responsible for salvation
Sin was avoidable
Demonstrate faith by good deeds

5. The Second Great Awakening
Church membership increased
Women & African Americans drawn to movement

6. Transcendentalism & Utopian Communities
Transcendentalism—the idea that people can rise above the material things in life
Transcendentalists believed that people should depend on themselves instead of upon outside authority.

7. Transcendentalism & Utopian Communities
Transcendentalists
Important Figures
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Margaret Fuller
Henry David Thoreau
Encouraged people to look within for guidance & to live simply

8. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

9. Transcendentalism & Utopian Communities
Utopian Communities—place where people worked to establish a perfect society

10. Transcendentalism & Utopian Communities
Most Transcendentalist communities were failures:
Brooke Farm
Community founded for Shakers by Ann Lee

11. The American Romantics
Artists
Focused on the American landscape
Thomas Cole

12. The American Romantics
Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville Moby-Dick
Edgar Allen Poe The Raven

13. The American Romantics
Other noted poets
Emily Dickinson
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
John Greenleaf Whittier
Walt Whitman