APUSH Chp 10 Vocab

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.

Second Great Awakening

A series of evangelical Protestant revivals extending from the 1790s to the 1830s that prompted thousands of conversions and widespread optimism about Americans' capacity for progress and reform.

Benevolent Empire

A web of reform organizations, heavily Whig in their political orientation, built by evangelical Protestant men and women influenced by the Second Great Awakening.

Maine Law

The nation's first state law for the prohibition of liquor manufacture and sales, passed in 1851.

American Renaissance

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

romanticism

A European philosophy that rejected the ordered rationality of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, embracing human passion, spiritual quest, and self-knowledge. Romanticism strongly influenced American transcendentalism.

transcendentalism

A nineteenth-century American intellectual movement that posited the importance of an ideal world of mystical knowledge and harmony beyond the immediate grasp of the senses. Influenced by romanticism, 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.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons

Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. After Smith's death at the hands of an angry mob, in 1846 Brigham Young led many followers of Mormonism to lands in present-day Utah.

plural marriage

The practice of men taking multiple wives, which Mormon prophet Joseph Smith argued was biblically sanctioned and divinely ordained as a family system.

minstrel shows

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

penny papers

Sensational and popular urban newspapers that built large circulations by reporting crime and scandals.

Free African Societies

Organizations in northern free black communities that sought to help community members and work against racial discrimination, inequality, and political slavery.

African Methodist Episcopal Church

Church founded in 1816 by African Americans who were discriminated against by white Protestants. The church spread across the Northeast and Midwest and even founded a few congregations in the slave states of Missouri, Kentucky, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

David Walker's Appeal

The radical 1829 pamphlet by free African American David Walker in which he protested slavery and racial oppression, called for solidarity among people of African descent, and warned that slaves would revolt if the cause of freedom was not served.

abolitionism

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

American Anti-Slavery Society

The first interracial social justice movement in the United States, which advocated the immediate, unconditional end of slavery on the basis of human rights, without compensation to slave masters.

Underground Railroad

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

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.

Liberty Party

An antislavery political party that ran its first presidential candidate in 1844, controversially challenging both the Democrats and Whigs.

domesticity

A middle-class ideal of "separate spheres" that celebrated women's special mission as homemakers, wives, and mothers who exercised a Christian influence on their families and communities; it excluded women from professional careers, politics, and civic life.

Female Moral Reform Society

An organization led by middleclass Christian women who viewed prostitutes as victims of male lust and sought to expose their male customers while "rescuing" sex workers and encouraging them to pursue respectable trades.

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.

Seneca Falls Convention

The first women's rights convention in the United States. Held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, it resulted in a manifesto extending to women the egalitarian republican ideology of the Declaration of Independence.