Key Figures in 19th Century American History and Reform Movements

Samuel Morse

With his invention, there was no longer a need for the Pony Express.

Dorothea Dix

Worked to overhaul the treatment of the mentally insane.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The author of The Scarlet Letter.

Brigham Young

The person that led a persecuted religious group into the untamed frontier of Utah.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' which contributed to the beginning of the Civil War.

James Fenimore Cooper

Wrote The Last of the Mohicans.

Robert Fulton

Invented the steamboat.

Peter Cartwright

The best known Methodist preacher who was a traveling minister.

Horace Mann

He campaigned for better schools, higher teacher pay, and longer school terms.

Samuel Slater

Father of the American factory system.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

She insisted on leaving 'obey' out of her marriage vows and was a proponent of woman's suffrage.

Henry David Thoreau

He lived at Walden Pond and wrote the essay 'Civil Disobedience.'

Louisa May Alcott

The author of Little Women.

Walt Whitman

His most famous book of poems was Leaves of Grass.

Susan B. Anthony

She fought for women's suffrage with Elizabeth Stanton.

Joseph Smith

The founder of the Mormon church.

John J. Audubon

The naturalist who wrote and illustrated the book Birds of America.

William Lloyd Garrison

He published the newspaper called The Liberator and was a militant abolitionist.

Charles Finney

He devised the 'anxious bench' where repentant sinners could sit in full view of the congregation.

American Colonization Society

Founded for the purpose of transporting blacks back to Africa.

Frederick Douglass

American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman.

Eli Whitney

Invented interchangeable parts which streamlined factory production.

Herman Melville

He wrote Moby ***.

Catherine Beecher

A proponent of the Cult of Domesticity who encouraged her sisters to enter the teaching profession.