AP Review #11
Society, Culture and Reform
1820-1860
Antebellum Period
• The period before the Civil War
Second Great Awakening
1790-1835
• Religious movement amongst the
educated
• Reaction against Enlightenment thinking
• Rev. Timothy Dwight of Yale motivated
men to become preachers
Revivalism
• Charles G. Finney in upstate NY
• Appealed to emotions and fear
• “burned-over district” b/c of the “hell and
brimstone” preaching
Baptist and Methodists
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Peter Cartwright (Methodist)
Outdoor revival meetings
High number of conversions
Baptists and Methodists became largest
religious denominations by 1850
Mormons
• Joseph Smith 1830
• NY to OH to MO to IL. Smith killed in
Illinois
• Brigham Young leads them to UT where
they prospered
• Polygamy
Transcendentalists
• Emerson and Thoreau
• Questioned traditional religion and
capitalism
• Look for God in nature
• Artistic expression over wealth
• Supported Antislavery
Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Popular transcendentalist
• Urged Americans to create their own
culture instead of imitating Europe’s
• Leading critic of slavery and of the Union
cause during CW
Henry David Thoreau
• Leading transcendentalist
• Wrote Walden (nature)
• Civil Disobedience (protest of the
Mexican-American War)
• Inspired Gandhi and MLK, Jr.
Brook Farm
1841-1849
• George Ripley
• Communal farm of transcendentalists
• Artistic creativity and innovative
educational techniques
Shakers
1840s-mid 1900s
• Communal living (Utopia)
• Common property
• Women and men separate (no marriage or
sex)
New Harmony
• Nonreligious
• Robert Owen
• Utopian socialist community
Oneida community
1848-1881
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John Humphrey Noyes
Oneida, NY
Social and economic equality
Silverware
“Free love”
Charles Fourier
• Fourier Phalanxes
• People share work and living
arrangements
Temperance
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Banning of alcohol
American Temperance society
Alcoholism was a disease
Immigrants opposed
Slavery will overshadow movement
WCTU
18th amendment in 1919
Asylum Movement
• Structure and discipline would bring about
moral reform
• State-supported prisons, mental hospitals,
and poorhouses
• Dorothea Dix fought for mental hospitals
• Thomas Galludet school for the deaf
• Dr. Samuel Gridley school for the blind
Auburn system
• Prison system
• Rigid discipline, moral instruction, work
programs
Public school movement
• Fear of the future of the country b/c of
poor, illiterate immigrants
• Horace Mann
• Taught protestant morality in McGuffey
Readers – hard work, punctuality, sobriety
• Second Great Awakening fueled the
growth of private colleges
Cult of domesticity
• Women as moral leaders in the home and
educators of children
Seneca Falls Convention (1848)
• First women’s rights convention
• Declaration of Sentiments
• women's rights over shadowed by slavery
Abolitionism
• American Colonization Society (Monrovia,
Liberia)
William Lloyd Garrison
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American Antislavery Society
The Liberator
Radical abolitionist movement
Immediate abolition of slavery
Frederick Douglas
• Black abolitionist
• The North Star
• Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman