13) antebellum culture and reform

the romantic impulse

nationalism and romanticism in american painting

romanticism

can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, clam, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified the enlightenment

*feelings and emotions, intuitive thoughts

the romantic impulse

classical and romantic

classical

orderly, calm, harmonious, rational, balanced

romantic

disordered/turbulent, violent, irrational, emotional

nationalism and romanticism in paintings

hudson river school

writers of the romantic era

nathnial hawthorne, emily dickenson, walt whitman, henry david thoreau

american literature

james fenimore cooper

• book: the last of the mohicans

  • examines rugged individualism among white frontiersmen and native americans

walt whitman

book: leaves of grass

about democracy, liberation of the individual, and pleasures of the flesh

william lloyd garrison

publisher, trveling speaker for advocating abolition

garrison and his weekly newspaper “the liberator”

american antislavery societies are created 

black abolitionists

free blacks’ commitment to abolitionism

david walker - prominent black abolitionist

sojourner truth - ex slave, powerful motivational speaker

• “aint i a woman”

frederick douglass - ex slave, escaped from maryland and managed to learn how to read and write

anti-abolitionism

violent reprisals - burnings of meeting houses, threats, bombings

the abolitionism movement is divided

moderates - turn over their slaves as their property for a type of compensation

vs extremists - slavery must end, like william lloyd garrison

cant decide what the exact goal is

harriet beecher stowe

daughter of a prominent abolitionist

writes “uncle tom’s cabin” - fiction about slave owning establishment and the slaves themselves

becomes a best-seller