Chapter 16 - The Ferment of Reform and Culture (1790-1860)

(Chapter 16 in the 11th Edition)

  1. Reviving Religion
  2. church attendance was regular in 1850 (3/4 population)
  3. many relied on Deism (reason rather revelation); rejected original sin, denied Christ’s divinity but believed in supreme being that created universe
  4. Puritans of the past now-Unitarian faith (New England)
  5. God existed in only 1 person not in orthodox trinity; stressed goodness of human nature
  6. belief in free will & salvation through good work; pictured God as loving father
  7. appealed to intellectuals w/ rationalism & optimism
  8. liberalism in religion started in 1800– Second GreatAwakening
  9. tidal wave of spiritual fervor that resulted prison & church reform, temperance, women’s rights movement, abolition
  10. spread to masses through huge “camp meetings”
  11. Europeans went to West to Christianize Indians
  12. Methodists & Baptist stressed personal conversion, demo in church affairs, emotionalism
  13. Peter Cartwright-best known of “circuit riders”
  14. Charles Grandison Finney were greatest of revival preachers
  15. led massive revivals in Rochester & New York
  1. Denominational Diversity
  2. revival furthered fragmentation of religious faith
  3. New York w/ Puritans preaching “hellfire” known as “Burned Over District”
  4. Millerites (Adventists)-Christ return to earth on October 22, 1844 (didn’t come)
  5. widen lines between classes & region (much like 1st Great Awakening)
  6. conservatives, propertied-Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalists, Unitarians
  7. less prosperous and less learned of South West – Methodists & Baptists
  8. religions further split over the issue on slavery (Methodist, Presbyterians split)
  1. A Desert Zion in Utah
  2. Joseph Smith in 1830 in NY came up with the Mormon & Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
  3. antagonism toward Mormons for polygamy, drilling militia, voting as a unit
  4. Smith died but succeeded by Brigham Young who led followers to Utah
  5. grew quickly by 1850s by birth & immigration from Europe
  6. federal government marched to Utah when Young became governor but no bloodshed
  7. polygamy prevented Utah entrance to US till 1896
  1. Free School for a Free People
  2. tax-supported primary school was opposed because people related them to pauperism & were used by poor
  3. gradually support because “brats” might grow up to be rabbles with voting rights
  4. free public education triumphed in 1825 with manhood suffrage in the Age of Jackson
  5. ill taught & ill trained teachers
  6. Horace Mann fought for better school
  7. too expensive for many communities; black Americans were exempt from education
  8. important people: Noah Webster(dictionary); Ohioan William H. McGuffey (McGuffey’s Readers)
  1. Higher Goals for Higher Learning
  2. 2nd Great Awakening led to building of small schools in South & West (mainly for pride)
  3. mainly on Latin, Greek, Math, moral philosophy; little intellectual vitality but lots of boredom
  4. 1ststate supported university in Virginia by Jefferson (dedicated to freedom from religious & political shackles, modern languages and the sciences)
  5. women were thought to be damaged if they were too educated; a woman’s place was still in the home
  6. women’s education became somewhat respectable
  7. 1820s - Emma Willard established Tory Female Seminary (NY
  8. 1837 - Oberlin College became co-educational, already racially integrated (OH)
  9. 1837 – Mary Lyon established Mount Holyoke Seminary (College) (MA)
  10. libraries, public lectures, magazines flourished
  1. An Age of Reform
  2. reformers
  3. against the use of tobacco, alcohol, and profanity
  4. against the transit of mail on Sabbath
  5. supporting women’s rights
  6. against polygamy
  7. optimistic for a perfect society (women improve in reforms)
  8. naïve and or ignored problems of factory workers
  9. fought for no imprisonment for debt (poor locked in jail for less than $1)-gradually abolished
  10. criminal codes were softened, capital offenses decrease & reformatories added
  11. the mentally illwere treated badly - Dorothea Dix fought for better treatment
  12. increased agitation for peace with the American Peace Society in 1828 that declared war on war!
  1. Demon Rum-The “Old Deluder”
  2. drunkenness was widely spread
  3. weddings & funeral were disrupted
  4. the destruction of the family – spiritual welfare and the safety of women & children
  5. American Temperance Society (Boston, 1826)
  6. children’s clubs - “Cold Water Army”
  7. pamphlets
  8. Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There by T.S. Arthur
  9. work against the “Demon Drink” adopted 2 major tactics
  10. stressed temperance – the individual will to resist
  11. legislative - removed temptation; Neal S. Dow “Father of Prohibition”
  12. sponsored Maine Law of 1851 - prohibited manufacture & sale liquor(followed by others)
  1. Women in Revolt
  2. women stayed home, w/o voting rights, (19th Century)
  3. American women were better off than European women, however.
  4. many women avoided marriage all together
  5. gender roles differed sharply w/ raising economic role
  6. women: weak physically & emotionally but fine for teaching
  7. men: strong but crude if not guided by women
  8. women should be centered on the home – “the cult of domesticity” (even in reformer Catharine Beecher) but many felt this was not enough
  9. joined the cause for abolition of slavery, touched by reform
  10. women’s movement led by Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony “Suzy Bs”, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Blackwell (1stfemale medical graduate), Margaret Fuller, Grimke sisters (anti-slavery), Amelia Bloomer (semi-short skirts)
  11. Women’s Rights Convention in 1848) at Seneca Falls, NY – Seneca Fall Convention
  12. Declaration of Sentiments-spirit of Declaration of Independence - “all Men AND Women are created equal”
  13. demanded ballot for women
  14. launched modern women’s rights movement
  15. temperately eclipsed by slavery but conditions improved
  1. Wilderness Utopias
  2. Robert Owen founded New Harmony (1825)--> confusion
  3. Brook Farm - MA, 1841; 20 intellectuals committed to Transcendentalism, lasted until ‘46
  4. Oneida Community – NY, 1848; practiced free love, birth control, eugenic selection of parents to produce superior offspring, lasted 30 years primarily due to superior steel traps
  5. Shakers – 1770s communistic community, led by Mother Ann Lee, no marriage or sex so they become extinct by 1940 (how they lasted that long I do not know…)
  1. The Dawn of Scientific Achievement
  2. early Americans were interested in practical science than purescience; promoted safety, speed, and economy
  3. Thomas Jefferson - plow
  4. Nathaniel Bowditch-practical navigation
  5. Matthew Maury – ocean winds and currents
  6. most influential US scientists
  7. Benjamin Silliman-pioneer in chemistry, geology; Yale
  8. Louis Agassiz–biology; insisted on original research; Harvard
  9. Asa Gray – botany; “Columbus of American botany”; Harvard
  10. John Audubon – birds in their natural habitat; Audubon Society
  1. medicine in the US was primitive
  2. bleeding used for cure and curse
  3. smallpox & yellow fever still common and killed many – “bring out your dead”
  4. bad dental health (dead teeth pulled by town smithy)
  5. life expectancy short (+/- 40 years, less for black Americans)
  6. self-prescribed patent medicine shared with animals, worm destroying lozenges, fad diets (Graham crackers), dead toads
  7. surgery
  8. shot of whiskey for anesthesia
  9. tied down and carved up
  10. 1840s – laughing gas & ether as anesthetics
  1. Artistic Achievement
  2. architecture
  3. early 19th Century architecture lacked originality; US imitated Europeanstyles
  4. 1820-50 was Greek revival (independence from “terrible Turks”)--> later gothic forms
  5. Thomas Jefferson most able architect of generation (MonticelloUVA)
  6. artists/painting suffered
  7. no leisure time
  8. Puritan prejudice of art as sinful waste
  9. Gilbert Stuart - painted Washington & competed w/ English artists
  10. Charles Wilson Peale - painted 60 portraits of Washington
  11. John Trumbull- captured the Revolutionary War in paint
  12. post War of 1812 nationalism inspired American local landscapes – Hudson River school
  13. Music shaking off because puritans frowned on non-religion singing
  14. “darky” (OMG can you believe that!) tunes popular in minstrel shows (black-faced white performers)
  15. “Old Folk at Home”, Pennsylvanian, Stephen Foster (most famous)
  16. “Dixie”, Ohioan, Daniel Decatur Emmett (taken as the Confederate battle hymn)
  1. The Blossoming of a National Literature
  2. reading imported or plagiarized from Britain
  3. most American literature was practicalstuff (ex.Federalist, Common Sense, Daniel Webster’s legal orations, Ben Franklin’sAutobiography)
  4. “American” literature revived after War of Independenceespecially after War of 1812
  5. Knickerbocker group in New York (yes, the New York Knicks are really named the New York Knickerbockers)
  6. Washington Irving – general writer; 1stAmerican to win international recognition with The Sketch Book; also “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” & “Rip Van Winkle”
  7. James Fenimore Cooper - 1stAmericannovelist; The Spy, LeatherstockingTales(popular in Europe), and The Last of the Mohicans
  8. William Cullen Bryant-1st highly quality poems in USThanatopsis; New York Evening Post editor
  1. Trumpeters of Transcendentalism
  2. “golden age of literature” dawned in 2nd quarter of 19th Century with the New England based transcendentalist movement (1830)
  3. centered around Boston (the ”Athens of America”)
  4. anti-Locke (knowledge through senses) but rather truth is found not by observation alone but from and inner light
  5. individualism
  6. three primary writers/thinkers – 19th century “hippies”
  7. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  8. Phi Beta Kappa address “The American Scholar” urged Americans to throw off European traditions and be uniquely American
  9. stressed self-reliance, self-improvement, self-confidence, optimism, and freedom-condemned slavery
  10. Henry David Thoreau
  11. poet, mystic, non-conformists
  12. Walden: Or life in the Woods – 2 years living on Walden Pond engaged in a simple existence gaining truth through nature & meditation
  13. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience-further idealistic thought; didn’t pay taxes (why are you here? why are you NOT here?)
  14. Walt Whitman –
  15. poet; themes & style were romantic, emotional, unconventional, with frankness about sex
  16. “Poet Laureate of Democracy”
  17. Leaves of Grass – his love of the masses
  1. Glowing Literary Lights(YES! some of the “anti-transcendentalists” you’re reading in AP Lang!)
  2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow–poet
  3. based on American traditions - “Evangeline”, Song of Hiawatha”, and “The Courtship of Miles Standish”
  4. very popular in Europe – bust is in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey
  5. John Greenleaf Whittier – poet
  6. “fighting Quaker”; poet laureate of the anti-slavery crusade
  7. poems cried out against injustice, intolerance, inhumanity; social influence
  8. James Russell Lowell –poet, essayist, editor, diplomat
  9. political satire - Biglow Papers dealing with the Mexican war and the expansion of slavery
  10. Oliver Wendell Holmes – poet, essayist, novelist, lecturer, and wit
  11. “The Last Leaf” – about the Boston Tea Party
  12. Women writers
  13. Louisa May Alcott – Massachusetts-Little Women
  14. Emily Dickinson-themes of nature, love, death, immortality in poems
  15. William Gilmore Simms
  16. best southern literary figure
  17. “the [James Fenimore] Cooper of the South”(many books-life in frontier, south in Revolutionary War)
  1. Literary Individualists and Dissenters
  2. Edgar Allan Poe – {very dark and depressed} poet
  3. “The Raven”, “The Pit & the Pendulum”, “Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Gold Bug”
  4. invented modern detective novel
  5. morbid sensibility
  6. Calvinist obsession with original sin & the struggle between good & evil
  7. Nathaniel Hawthorne
  8. The Scarlet Letter; psychological effect on sin
  9. The Marble Faun; omnipresence of evil
  10. Herman Melville
  11. Moby Dick; an allegory of good & evil
  1. Portrayers of the Past(historians)
  2. most American historians were from New England
  3. had the most access to books & libraries
  4. anti-south bias
  5. friends & family were abolitionists so an engrained antipathy to slavery
  6. George Bancroft
  7. founded the United States Naval Academy
  8. “Father of American History”; published volumes of American History
  9. William H. Prescott
  10. published conquest of Mexico & Peru
  11. Francis Parkman
  12. published a series about the conflict between France & England for North America