Chapter 11: Religion and Reform Vocab/People to Know

Individualism

Word coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 to describe Americans as people no longer bound by social attachments to classes, castes, associations, and families.

American Renaissance

A literary explosion during the 1840s inspired in part by Emerson's ideas on the liberation of the individual.

Transcendentalism

A nineteenth-century intellectual movement that posited the importance of an ideal world of mystical knowledge and harmony beyond the immediate grasp of the senses. Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau called for the critical examination of society

and emphasized individuality, self-reliance, and nonconformity.

Utopias

Communities founded by reformers and transcendentalists to help realize their spiritual and moral potential and to

escape from the competition of modern industrial society

Socialism

A system of social and economic organization based on

the common ownership of goods or state control of the economy.

Perfectionism

Christian movement of the 1830s that believed people could achieve moral perfection in their earthly lives because the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred.

Mormonism

The religion of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. After Smith's death at the hands of an angry mob, Brigham Young led many followers of Mormonism to lands in present-day Utah in 1846.

Minstresly

Popular theatrical entertainment begun around 1830, in which white actors in blackface presented comic routines that combined racist caricature and social criticism.

Abolitionism

The social reform movement to end slavery immediately and without compensation that began in the United States in the 1830s.

Underground Railroad

An informal network of whites and free blacks in the South that assisted fugitive slaves to reach freedom in the North.

Amalgamation

A term for racial mixing and intermarriage, almost universally opposed by whites in the nineteenth-century United States.

Gag rule

A procedure in the House of Representatives from 1836 to 1844 by which antislavery petitions were automatically tabled when they were received so that they could not become the subject of debate.

Separate Sphere

A term used by historians to describe the nineteenth century view that men and women have different gender-defined characteristics and, consequently, that men should dominate the public sphere of politics and economics, while women should manage the private sphere of home and family.

Domestic slavery

A term referring to the assertion by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other female abolitionists that traditional gender roles and legal restrictions created a form of slavery for married women.

Married women's property laws

Laws enacted between 1839 and 1860 in New York and other states that permitted married women to own, inherit, and bequeath property.