Chapter 11: Society, Culture,
and Reform (1820-1860)
Second Great Awakening
 Revivals in New York: Charles G. Finney
 Baptists and Methodists: Peter Cartwright
 Millennialism: William Miller
 Mormons: 1) Joseph Smith
2) Brigham Young (New Zion)
Caused division between newer sections and
older Protestant churches
Culture
 Transcendentalists
 mystical and
intuitive way of
thinking. Means of
discovering one’s
inner self and
looking for the
essence of God in
nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
 “The American Scholar”
1837 address at Harvard.
 Break away from British
control.
 Self-reliance, independent
thinking.
 Spiritual matters over
material matters.
Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
 2 year experiment alone
in woods, find truth of life
and universe.
 Walden (1854) pioneer
ecologist and
conservationist.
 “On Civil Disobedience”
advocate of nonviolent
protest.
Brook Farm
Communal Experiments
New Harmony
Oneida Community
Arts & Literature
Hudson River School
Painters
 George Caleb Bingham: common people
doing ordinary things.
 William S. Mount: rural compositions
 Thomas Cole & Frederick Church: beauty of
American landscape
Literature
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
- Leatherstocking Tales
Temperance
Public Asylums; mental hospitals,
schools for the deaf and blind, and
prisons
Dr. Samuel Gridley
Howe (school for
blind)
Thomas Gallaudet
(school for the
deaf)
Dorothea Dix
Public Education
Horace Mann
William Holmes McGuffey
Changing Families
Cult of Domesticity
Women’s Rights Movement
Sarah & Angelina Grimke
Lucretia Mott
Seneca Falls Convention 1848
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Susan B. Anthony
Antislavery Movement
American Colonization Society 1817
William Lloyd Garrison
The Liberator
Frederick Douglass
The North Star