Reformers List

Amelia Bloomer

American women's rights and temperance advocate, her name became associated with women's clothing reform style known as bloomers

Angelina and Sarah Grimke

Quakers, educators and writers who were early advocates of abolitionism and women's rights. Angelina Grimké married abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Pushed for suffrage at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and led the movement for many years.

Lucretia Mott

She, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.

Lucy Stone

Refused to take her husband's name, as an assertion of her own rights

Sojourner Truth

African-American who was born into slavery, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. She became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. Her best-known extemporaneous speech on gender inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?"

Susan B. Anthony

she collected anti-slavery petitions. She became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Anthony was arrested for voting in her hometown. Anthony and Stanton arranged for Congress to be presented with an amendment giving women the right to vote. Popularly known as the Anthony Amendment, it became the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920

William Lloyd Garrison

He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He promoted the "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United States rejecting the more moderate beginnings of the abolitionist movement.

David Walker

He published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against oppression and injustice.

Elijah Lovejoy

Presbyterian minister, He was murdered by pro-slavery mob during their attack on his warehouse to destroy his press and abolitionist materials.

Frederick Douglass

After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, known for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He published The North Star newspaper and eventually helped to get black troops organized during the Civil War.

Theodore Dwight Weld

He is best known for his co-authorship of the authoritative compendium, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. He married Angelina Grimke.

John Brown

believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery. Took part in the so-called Pottawatomie Massacre, killing five slavery supporters. Brown led an unsuccessful raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry that ended with his capture.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin which energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South.

Elizabeth Blackwell

First woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.

Dorothea Dix

created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the American Civil War, Dix was also appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses by the Union Army, beating out Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.

Henry David Thoreau

He is best known for his book Walden. Thoreau believed in a government was best that governed not at all and used civil disobedience by refusing to pay his taxes to support the Mexican War and a government that allowed slavery.

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was especially known in her time for her personality and, in particular, for being overly self-confident and having a bad temper. This personality was the inspiration for the character Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He was seen as a champion of individualism and a critic of the countervailing pressures of society. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature.

Horace Mann

Argued that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, Mann has been credited by educational historians as the "Father of the Common School Movement.”

Mary Lyon

She established the Wheaton Female Seminary She then established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary . Lyon's vision fused intellectual challenge and moral purpose.

Catharine Beecher

American educator known for her forthright opinions on female education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of kindergarten into children's education. She also promoted physical fitness for women.

Harriet Tubman

Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made about thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved family and friends,[1] using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.

William Holmes McGuffey

Best known for writing the McGuffey (Peerless Pioneer) Readers, the first widely used series of textbooks.

Emma Willard

American women's rights activist who dedicated her life to education. And founded the first school for women’s higher education, the Troy Female Seminary

Noah Webster

His blue-backed speller taught five generations of American children how to spell and read. His name has become synonymous with the dictionary.

Walt Whitman

his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. He also wrote “My Captain, My Captain” about the death of Lincoln.

Emily Dickinson

American poet whose poems are unique for the era in which she wrote. They contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

American author whose works belong to romanticism or, more specifically, dark romanticism, cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity. His major works were The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852.)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline.

James Fenimore Cooper

created a unique form of American literature. among his most famous works is The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

Louisa May Alcott

American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys.

Herman Melville

American novelist, writer of short stories, and poet from the American Renaissance period. He is best known for his whaling novel Moby-Dick.

Washington Irving

American author best known for his short stories "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820).

Edgar Allan Poe

American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Famous for The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart.

Thomas Cole

He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, and was known for his realistic and detailed portrayal of American landscape and wilderness, which feature themes of romanticism.

Frederic Church

American landscape painter. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Olana was his home and studio.

Charles Grandison Finney

American Presbyterian minister and leader in the Second Great Awakening in the United States. He has been called The Father of Modern Revivalism and was influential as a preacher in the “Burned Over District” of NY

Joseph Smith

American religious leader and founder of Mormonism. According to Smith, he experienced a series of visions, including "two personages" (presumably God the Father and Jesus Christ) and an angel. Smith published the Book of Mormon

Brigham Young

American leader in the Latter Day Saint movement (Mormon) and a leader of the Mormon move to Utah after Joseph Smith was killed. He was the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Mother Ann Lee

Leader of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or Shakers. She and her followers worshiped by ecstatic dancing or “shaking” which dubbed them as the Shaking Quakers or Shakers. She preached that sinfulness could be avoided not only by treating men and women equally, but also by keeping them separated so as to prevent any sort of temptation leading to impure acts.

Robert Owen

one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement. Owen himself began a cooperative project but after a trial of about two years, the project failed.

John Humphrey Noyes

He the “perfectionist” Oneida Community and is credited for having coined the term "free love". The Oneida Community was a religious commune founded in 1848 in Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be free of sin and perfect in this world, not just Heaven