NOTE-TAKING GUIDE: Of the People: A History of the United States CHAPTER 12 “Reform and Conflict: 1820 – 1840”
COMMON THREADS

How did African American activism change over time?

How did the market revolution shape the Benevolent Empire?

How did the conditions of paid labor change between 1789 and 1835?

Why did many white northerners oppose abolition?
OUTLINE
Perfectionism and the Theology of Human Striving
Millennialism and Communitarians
Urban Revivals
The Benevolent Empire
America and the World: The American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions
Reform and the Urban Classes
Wage Dependency and Labor Protest
American Landscape: Freedom and Wage Labor
A New Urban Middle Class
Immigration and Nativism
Internal Migration
Self-Reform and Social Regulation
A Culture of Self-Improvement
Temperance
The Common School Movement
Penal Reform
Electoral Politics and Moral Reform
Abolition and Women’s Rights
Antislavery Becomes Abolition
Abolitionism and Antiabolition Violence
The Gender Limits of Antebellum Activism
Conclusion
WHO?
WHAT?
Nat Turner
The Benevolent
David Walker
Empire
Perfectionism
The gag rule
Freedom’s Journal
Lyceum movement
South Carolina
Exposition and
Protest
Moral suasion
Finneyite revivals
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What conditions gave rise to labor protest in the 1820s and 1830s?
What forms did that protest take?
2. What conditions gave rise to the early women’s rights movement?
3. Did the rise of perfectionism and the Benevolent Empire reflect a new
democratic impulse or a desire for social control?
4. Why did some reformers abandon the tactic of “moral suasion” over
time?
NOTES: TO FOLLOW UP / QUESTIONS TO ASK IN CLASS