Chapter 11: Religion and Reform 1820-1860
Identifications and Guiding Questions
1. Explain how economic and political change in the 1820s and 1830s transformed the way
Americans thought about themselves and their society.
2. What was the origin of “individualism” and what was its affinity with the
transcendentalist movement?
3. Describe the various communal settlements and the objectives of their participants.
4. Explain how and why the public and private roles of women changed between 1820 and
1860.
5. Why did abolitionism become the dominant American reform movement? What was the
significance of antislavery activists in American politics and society?
6. Why were plans for colonization and gradual emancipation more popular than abolition
among white Americans? What motivated the abolitionists?
Identifications:
4.1 Individualism: The Ethic of the Middle Class
Ralph Waldo Emerson
transcendentalism
Lyceum movement
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
4.2 Rural Communalism and Urban Popular Culture
Utopias
Shakers
Oneida Community
Joseph Smith and Mormons
Brigham Young
Attitudes towards sex
Minstrelsy
4.3 Abolitionism
Abolitionism
David Walker: Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
Nat Turner’s Rebellion 1831
William Lloyd Garrison: The Liberator
Underground Railroad
American Anti-Slavery Society
Antiabolitionists
4.4 The Women’s Rights Movement
“separate spheres”
Dorothea Dix
Married women’s property laws
Seneca Falls Convention 1848
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Susan B. Anthony