Download Mid 1800s Culture and Reform

Mid 1800s
Culture and
Reform
Unit 4.3
Religion
• 2nd Great Awakening
o Revivals – appealing to emotions
• Charles Finney
• Cane Ridge
o Baptist and Methodist Churches grow
• Largest Protestant denominations by 1850
o Formation of African-American churches. Why?
o Split of churches over what issue?
Church of Latter-Day Saints
• Founded in 1830 by
Joseph Smith (in NY)
o Writes Book of Mormon
• Moved to Illinois
o Smith killed by mob
o Faced Persecution
o Why?
• Brigham Young takes
over leadership
• 1847, Young leads
Mormons to Utah.
o Prosper on Great Salt Lake
o What would save them from
katydids (Mormon Crickets)?
• What issue would cause
conflicts with U.S.
government?
The Transcendentalists
• Transcendentalism – both a writing style and a
philosophy
o
o
o
o
Stressed individualism, nature, and self reliance
Stressed reason and understanding (finding inner self)
Questioned established churches and consumerism
Supported a variety of reforms
• Most famous:
o Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Essay – “Self-reliance”
o Henry David Thoreau
• Essay – “Civil Disobedience”
• Book - Walden
Utopian Communities
• Idea of withdrawing
from Conventional
society to create the
“ideal” society
• Some religious
o Mormons
o Shakers
• Held property in common
• Forbid marriage and sex
• Any guess why they died
out from 6,000 in 1840s?
• Social Communal
Experiments
o New Harmony (Indiana) founded
by Robert Owen
• Reaction to Industrial
Revolution
o Brook Farm (Massachusetts)
• Attracted Transcendentalists
o Why attracted?
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
o Oneida (New York)
• Criticized for communal childrearing and “free-love”
• Why did it survive?
Literature
• Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau
• After War of 1812 writers became more nationalistic
and American themes became popular.
o
o
o
o
James Fenimore Cooper – Leatherstocking Tales, Last of the Mohicans
Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville – Moby Dick
Walt Whitman – poetry
• Romanticism style / “Nature”
Architecture and Art
stressed American and common man themes
• Architecture adopted
Greek styles
o Glorified democratic spirit
during Jacksonian era.
o Columned facades
• Hudson River school
o Expressed beauty of American
landscapes
• Showed nature
o Thomas Cole
o Frederic Church
Drinking Problem?
• Temperance Movement – concerned with high rate of
alcohol consumption and effects
American Temperance Society founded in 1826
Movement led by Women
Maine became 1st state to have prohibition
In 1850s, issue of slavery overshadowed temperance, but after Civil War the
movement would gain strength again (Women’s Christian Temperance Union)
o Sylvester Graham
o
o
o
o
What about those with disabilities?
• Schools for Blind and
Deaf
o Thomas Gallaudet founded first
school for deaf. Model for
reform.
• Mental Asylums
o Dorothea Dix shocked to find
mentally ill were housed in
prisons.
o Worked for mental hospitals and
treatment at state expense.
o Dix also worked for prison reforms
Teachers, leave those kids alone…
•
•
•
•
•
•
Reformers concerned with growing numbers of uneducated poor.
Workers pushed for public (tax-supported) schools in cities
Horace Mann – leading advocate
Advances added:
o Teacher-training schools
o Compulsory attendance laws
o Standardized school year
By 1850, most in north went till age 10
Germans thought it was “Americanization”
o
Was it?
Woman’s Role in 1800s
• Industrialization effects in cities
o Men left home for work while women managed household and children
• Agricultural advances in country
o Majority of people were still farmers
o Women were needed less to help with physical work.
o Role also more in the house and with children
• Cult of Domesticity – men were expected to be responsible for
economic and political affairs while women on care of home and children
Women’s Rights Movement
• Starts with middle-class women, many in anti-slavery movement.
o Sarah and Angelina Grimke – upset about male opposition to their activities
o Support stronger in North.
• Seneca Falls Convention 1848 – first women’s rights
convention
o Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott
o Issued their Declaration of Sentiments
•
•
Most Americans agreed some with movement, but were not in support of
radical change.
Movement was overshadowed by crisis over slavery
• In later decades, Susan B. Anthony becomes leader.
• When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary
for one portion of the family of man to assume among the
people of the earth a position different from that which they
have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature
and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the
causes that impel them to such a course.
• We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and
women are created equal; that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these
rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of
government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right
of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to
insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its
foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their
safety and happiness.
Abolition
• American Colonization Society – idea in early 1800s
to transport freed slaves to African colony of Liberia
o Why did some people like this idea (for the wrong reasons)?
o Why did it not work?
• American Anti-slavery Society
o led by William Lloyd Garrison through his newspaper The Liberator
o Garrison seen as radical in views
• Liberty Party – 3rd party in 1840 and 1844 that opposed slavery
Perfectionism
• The Perfectionism Movement was this idea in the
mid-1800s that humans can change the earth to
make it better (“Cure society’s ills”)
• The reform movements, religious movements, as
well as literary movements contribute to this idea.
Reflection Questions
• How did the ideas of the utopian communities and
the transcendentalists help led to reforms?
• In what ways did the “American” culture mature
and develop during after the War of 1812?
• In what ways was the Perfectionist movement
shown in the reforms?
• How were many of these reform and cultural
movement interwoven?
Links
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL7Zd0SWWvE&l
ist=UUZYs757tACChkSvjS1m66Q&index=52&feature=plcp – review video
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdjbOxyRwEM
– women rights
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-5aT4hfBIE –
1800s education reform song
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m58FDTyZa7k –
reform movements PowerPoint