Transcript Day 59: The Ferment of Reform and Culture

Baltimore Polytechnic Institute
November 21, 2013
A/A.P. U.S. History
Mr. Green
Objectives:
Students will analyze antebellum reform movements including
religion, education, prohibition, and women’s rights.
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.
AP Focus
The Second Great Awakening releases a torrent of religious fervor,
combining a belief in moral self-improvement and a wish to expand
democracy by means of evangelicalism. Religion and Reform are among
the new AP themes.
From the 1830s to 1850s, the nation experiences a burst of reform
activity. Various movements set out to democratize the nation further by
combating what they see as institutions and ideas that thwart the
expression of democratic values and principles.
CHAPTER THEME
The spectacular religious revivals of the
Second Great Awakening reversed a trend
toward secular rationalism in American
culture and helped to fuel a spirit of social
reform. In the process, religion was
increasingly feminized, while women, in turn,
took the lead in movements of reform,
including those designed to improve their
own condition.
Continue your work on Presidential Election
Charts 1836, 1840, 1844, 1848
Decades Chart for the 1830’s due Friday
Quiz on Friday covering Chapter 14
Conditions for women
Life was home, required to obey her master (husband), could not
vote, subject to beatings, could not keep property after marriage
Many women avoided marriage now, something they couldn’t
necessarily do in the colonial period
Female reformers
Most female reformers were rich and white
Joined in reform for temperance and abolition as well
Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,
Elizabeth Blackwell, Margaret Fuller, Sarah and Angeline Grimke,
Lucy Stone, Amelia Bloomer (bloomers – short skirt with Turkish
pants)
Rights convention – Declaration of Sentiments – demands for
women – launched modern women’s rights movement
Woman’s Rights
Convention at Seneca
Falls, NY - 1848
Cooperative societies virtually all failed or changed
their methods sooner or later
New Harmony – colony sank out of confusion
Brook Farm – lost a new building before it was
finished in 1846, collapsed in debt
Oneida Community – free love, birth control,
eugenics to get better offspring
Lasted 30 years making good steel traps and
silver plates
Shakers – Upstate New York
Extinct by 1940 because they prohibited
marriage and sex
Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Prof. Louis Agassiz, Prof. Asa Gray,
John J. Audubon – Birds of America
Audubon Society for the protection of birds
Medicine
bleeding was common cure, smallpox plagues still an
issue, yellow fever in Philadelphia 1793, malaria, no
knowledge of germs and sanitation
Life expectancy was 40 years for a white born in 1850
Decayed teeth, tooth extraction done by blacksmith
Fad diets
Medicine by regular doctors was harmful
Surgery performed after stiff whiskey, patient tied down
Laughing gas and ether developed in early 1840s
Artistic Achievements
Imitated European models – public buildings in Greek and
Roman style
1820-1850 Greek revival
Thomas Jefferson brought classical designs with
Monticello
Painting suffered because people just didn’t have time.
Working hard for dollars
Early painters went to England
People thought it was a sinful waste of time
Some competent painters like Gilbert Stuart, Charles Wilson
Peale (MD), John Trumbull
Hudson River School known for landscapes
Painting’s competition was the daguerreotype in 1839
Minstrel shows – white actors in blackface singing “darky
music”
Stephen Foster went to the south once, then went back to PA
to write some of the most popular American folk music –
captured spirit of the slaves
Most Americans wrote political essays, not
literature
Common Sense, Federalist papers
After 1812, nationalism increased and the
northeast wasn’t too focused on surviving –
had time to write
Knickerbocker Group in NY, Washington Irving,
James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant
Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
celebrated what literary movement?
Transcendentalism – truth transcends the senses,
cannot be found by observation alone, everyone
has inner light that can illuminate the highest
truth and put him or her in direct touch with God
-no precise definition
Individualism
-self-reliance, self-culture, self-discipline
Thoreau was jailed for not paying taxes –
condemned a government that supported slavery
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
◦ Poetry
John Greenleaf Whittier
◦ Influenced social action
James Russell Lowell
◦ Poet
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
◦ Anatomy teacher
Louisa May Alcott
◦ Little Women
Emily Dickinson
William Gilmore Simms
Edgar Allen Poe
Orphaned, had diseases, wife died of TB at 13
Failed to kill himself, went to drinking
Horror writing
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Scarlet Letter
Struggle between good and evil, original sin
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Stories of the south seas where he traveled and
escaped cannibals
George Bancroft
◦ Helped found Naval Academy
◦ History of the U.S. to 1789
William H. Prescott
◦ Accounts of conquest of Mexico and Peru
◦ France v. Britain in colonial times
Historians
◦ New Englanders
1. What inspired the many utopian
communities of the early 19th century? What
issues or problems did various utopias
attempt to address? Should the utopias be
viewed as failures because most did not last
long or attain the perfection they sought? Or
should they be seen as natural, intense
outgrowths of America’s own utopian ideals,
of liberty, equality, and democracy?
Finish reading all of Chapter 15
Quiz at the beginning of class on Friday.