Unit VIII – Jacksonian Democracy and the Age of Reform (Chapters 13 and 15)

Objectives:

  • Analyze the celebration of Andrew Jackson’s victory in 1828 as a triumph of the New Democracy over the more restrictive and elitist politics of the early Republic
  • Describe the political innovations of the 1830s, especially the rise of mass parties, Jackson’s use of the presidency to stir up public opinion and indicate their significance for American politics
  • Explain Jackson’s economic and political motives for waging the bitter Bank War, and show how Jacksonian economics crippled his successor Van Buren after the Panic of 1837
  • Describe the different ways that each of the new mass political parties, Democrats and Whigs, promoted the democratic ideals of liberty and equality among their constituencies
  • Describe the widespread revival of religion in the early nineteenth century and its effects on American culture and social reform
  • Describe the cause of the most important American reform movements of the period, identifying which were most successful and why
  • Explain the origins of American feminism, describe its essential principles, and summarize its early successes and failures
  • Identify the most notable early American achievements in science, medicine, the visual arts, and music, and explain why advanced science and culture had difficulty taking hold on American soil
  • Analyze the American literary flowering of the early nineteenth century, especially the transcendentalist movement, and identify the most important writers who dissented from the optimistic spirit of the time

  1. Andrew Jackson
  2. John C. Calhoun
  3. Henry Clay
  4. John Quincy Adams
  5. Daniel Webster
  6. Nicholas Biddle
  7. Denmark Vesey
  8. “Favorite son”
  9. Common man
  10. Nullification
  11. Spoils system
  12. Rotation in office
  13. Speculation
  14. Nationalism
  15. Minority president
  16. National Republicans
  17. “Revolution of 1828”
  18. Twelfth Amendment
  19. “King Mob”
  20. “Corrupt bargain”
  21. Tariff of Abominations
  22. Tariff of 1832
  23. Specie Circular
  24. “Slavocracy”
  25. Panic of 1837
  26. Bank of the United States
  27. Independent treasury
  28. Democratic party
  29. “Pet” banks
  30. Whig party
  31. Nullifiers
  32. Unionists
  33. Dorothea Dix
  34. James Russell Lowell
  35. Oliver Wendell Holmes
  36. Lucretia Mott
  37. Horace Mann
  38. Noah Webster
  39. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  40. Edgar Allan Poe
  41. Susan B. Anthony
  42. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  43. Nathaniel Hawthorne
  44. Henry David Thoreau
  45. Herman Melville
  46. Joseph Smith
  47. Walt Whitman
  48. Brigham Young
  49. American Temperance Society
  50. Shakers
  51. Maine Law
  52. Unitarianism
  53. Second Great Awakening
  54. Hudson River School
  55. Women’s Rights Convention
  56. Burned-Over District
  57. Declaration of Sentiments
  58. Transcendentalism
  59. Oneida Community
  60. Mormons