Notes on “Ferment of Reform and Culture”

 

I.                  Religion in Young America:

a.    2^nd Great Awakening- religious revivalism and spirituality

                                                             i.      Reaction against religious liberalism (especially Deism and Unitarianism)

                                                          ii.      Revivalist ministers “toured” America 1800-1850 to spread the Gospel. They had a strong anti-alcohol and anti-slavery base

                                                        iii.      Western New York was the hotbed of revivalism “Burned Over District”

                                                        iv.      Strong appeal to west and south, lower economic groups

 

b.    Slavery issue would split numerous Protestant denominations as the Civil War approached

c.     Mormons led by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young established a theocracy (religious ruled community) in Utah

 

II.              Free School for Free People

a.    Public education grew slowly and painfully in America

b.    Leaders in American education: Horace Mann, Noah Webster, William McGuffey

c.     Establishment of many small liberal arts colleges with religious affiliations, especially in the South and West

d.    Education of women or opportunities for education lagged mostly due to male prejudices

 

III.           Reform in American society 1800-1860

a.    Reform movements were numerous, religiously affiliated and often spearheaded by female leadership

b.    Popular causes included education, prison reform, treatment of the poor, mentally ill, criminal codes, temperance

c.     Women’s Rights movement had its roots in the pre-Civil War era Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer

                                                             i.      Seneca Falls Convention (NY) 1848- First women’s rights convention

d.    Utopian movements- ideal societies of all types based on communalism, “free-love”, “planned living”, and/or religious piety were born and died

e.    Most significant was the joining of religious and social reformers in the abolitionist movement to end black slavery. Its consequences were enormous

 

IV.            A National literature

a.    Most of America’s early literature was either of a political or religious nature, stemming from the colonial and Revolutionary experience

b.    After 1820, a distinct American school of writers emerges

                                                             i.      Knickerbocker Group- Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant

                                                          ii.      Transcendentalists- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman

                                                        iii.      “Glowing Literary Lights” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Simms

                                                        iv.      Individualists and Dissenters- Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville