Chapter 11 – Religion and Reform (1820-1860)
- What 3 factors inspired Americans in the 1830’s to believe that they could improve their personal lives and society as a whole?
- ______
- ______
- ______
- What various causes of reform did William Lloyd Garrison embrace?
- What were some of the radical ideas that middle-class northern and Midwestern reformers promoted?
Individualism: The Ethic of the Middle Class
- Who coined the word “individualism”? What did he mean by it?
- What was the American Renaissance? Who inspired it? On what central idea was it based?
- TRANSCENDENTALISM:
- Who was the leading voice?
- Where was it rooted?
- Who inspired it?
- What was its view of religion?
- What were its core beliefs?
- Where did Emerson and Transcendentalists believe a person’s true transcendent self could be discovered?
- What became the most effective method of spreading the teachings of Emerson and Transcendentalism?
- What kind of people did Emerson celebrate, and to whom did this ethos most appeal?
- What attitude did Emerson promote when he urged American writers to free themselves from the “courtly muse “of Old Europe and instead to find inspiration in the experiences of ordinary Americans?
- What did Emerson’s friend and student, Henry David Thoreau, do in his search for “meaning beyond the artificiality of civilized society”?
- What is Thoreau’s most famous metaphor, and what social premise did this inspire in future generations of Americans?
- How did Margaret Fuller translate Transcendentalism into a “new era” for women?
- What form did Walt Whitman’s transcendental expression take?
- How was Whitman slightly different than the other Transcendentalists, Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller?
- Despite the occasional “dark murmurings” of Transcendentalists about human suffering, what was the most optimistic aspect of Transcendentalism?
- What was the more pessimistic world view of novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville?
- How did Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter reveal the darker side of individualism?
- How did Melville’s story in Moby Dick contradict the tenets of Transcendentalism?
- How was Moby Dick received by the American public? Why?
- How was Brook Farm, the utopian community, an expression of Transcendentalist principles?
- Why did Brook Farm fail?
- How did the failure of Brook Farm change the vision of Transcendentalists?
IDENTIFY the following terms/figures: William Lloyd Garrison, Alexis de Tocqueville, American Renaissance, Unitarianism, Walden, or Life in the Woods, Leaves of Grass, Utopian Societies