APUSH - Reformers/ Antebellum Authors/ Etc.

Amelia Bloomer

• American women’s rights and temperance advocate

• Didn’t create the women’s clothing reform style known as bloomers

  • name became associated because of her early and strong advocacy and her willingness to wear them.

Angelina and Sarah Grimke

• 19th century Southern American Quakers, educators, and writers

• Early advocates of abolitionism and women’s rights

• Angelina Grimke married abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld in May 1838

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women’s rights movement

• Pushed for suffrage at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848

  • Led the movement for many years

Lucretia Mott

• American Quaker, abolitionist, a women’s rights activist, and social reformer

• With Elizabeth Cady Stanton, helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848

Lucy Stone

• Prominent American orator, abolitionist, and suffragist, and a vocal advocate and organizer promoting rights for women

• Refused to take her husband’s name as an assertion of her own rights

• Women who continue to use their birth name after marriage are still occasionally known as “Lucy Stoners”

Sojourner Truth

• African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist

• Born into slavery, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826

• First black woman to win such a case (recovering her son) against a white man

• Sojourner Truth was named Isabella “Bell” Baumfree when she was born

• Her best-known extemporaneous speech on gender inequalities, “Ain’t I a Woman” was delivered in 1851

Susan B. Anthony

• American social reformer who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement

• Born into a Quaker family

• Committed to social equality

  • Collected anti-slavery petitions at 17

• Arrested and convicted publicly

• With Elizabeth Cady Stanton, it was arranged with Congress to present an amendment giving women the right to vote (19th Amendment)

William Lloyd Garrison

• Prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer

• Editor of newspaper The Liberator

• A founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society

• Promoted immediate emancipation of slaves

• Prominent voice for the woman suffrage movement

David Walker

• Militant African-American abolitionist and anti-slavery activist

• Published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

  • Call for black unity and self help in their fight for justice

Elijah Lovejoy

• American Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor, and abolitionist

• Murdered by a pro-slavery mob who wanted to destroy his press and materials

Frederick Douglass

• African-American social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman

• Escaped from slavery and became a leader of the abolitionist movement

  • Known for dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings

• Published The North Star newspaper and helped black troops get organized during the Civil War

Theodore Dwight Weld

• Leading architects of the American abolitionist movement during its formative years

• Writer, editor, speaker, and organizer

• Co-authorship of American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses

• Married Angelina Grimke

John Brown

• White American abolitionist

• Believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow slavery

• Put on trial for an unsuccessful raid with a sentence of death by hanging

Harriet Beecher Stowe

• American abolitionist and author

• Author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (depiction of African American life under slavery)

• Energized anti-slavery forces in the North, provoked anger in the South

Harriet Tubman

• African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the Civil War

• Born into slavery, made 13 missions to rescue other enslaved people

  • Through the Underground Railroad

Elizabeth Blackwell

• First woman to receive a medical degree in the U.S.

• Inspired by her late friend who would’ve been more comfortable with a woman as a doctor

• Felt that woman would be better doctors because of their motherly instincts

Dorothea Dix

• American activist advocating for the insane

• Created the first generation of American mental asylums

Henry David Thoreau

• American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, historian, and leading transcendentalist

• Author of Walden (reflections) and Civil Disobedience

• Not an anarchist, but believed government is best when not governed at all

• Civil disobedience by refusing to pay taxes to support the Mexican War and a government that allowed slavery

Margaret Fuller

• American journalist and women’s rights advocate associated with transcendentalism

• Invited to Brook Farm (utopian experiment)

• Overly self-confident with a bad temper

• Inspired Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• American essayist, lecturer, and poet

• Led the Transcendentalist movement

• Champion of individualism and critic of countervailing pressures of society

• Gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs in 1836 essay Nature

Horace Mann

• American education reformer

• Argued that universal public education is the best to turn children into proper citizens

• Won widespread approval from modernizers for building public schools

• Credited by educational historians as the Father of the Common School Movement

Mary Lyon

• American pioneer in women’s education

• Established Wheaton Female Seminary (Wheaton College)

• Established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (Mount Holyoke College)

Catherine Beecher

• Educator known for her strong opinions on female education

• Supported the incorporation of kindergarten into children’s education

• Thought women were best in society as mothers/teachers

• Felt men and women had different purposes, so women should avoid politics

William Holmes McGuffey

• Known for writing the McGuffey Readers

  • First widely used textbooks

Emma Willard

• American Women’s rights activist who dedicated her life to education

• Worked in several schools and founded the first school for women’s higher education

• Troy Female Seminary was later the Emma Willard School

Noah Webster

• American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English language spelling reformer

• Called the Father of American Scholarship and Education

• Name synonymous with the dictionary

Walt Whitman

• American poet, essayist, journalist

• Humanist during the period between transcendentalism and realism so his works contained both views

• Influential poet in American, Father of Free Verse

• Work was very controversial at the time

Emily Dickinson

• American poet who wrote unique poems

• Short lines, lacked titles, slant rhyme and irregular punctuation

• Poems dealt with death and immortality

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• American author who focused on dark romanticism and cautionary tails

• Work was loaded with deep psychological themes

• Negative view of the Transcendentalist movement

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• American poet and educator

• Works included Paul Revere’s Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline

James Fenimore Cooper

• Prolific and popular American writer

• Historical romances of the frontier and Native American life in the early years

Louisa May Alcott

• American novelist (Little Women)

• Raised by transcendentalist parents

• Grew up among many intellectuals

Herman Melville

• American novelist, writer of short stories, poet from the American Renaissance

• Author of Moby Dick

Washington Irving

• American author best known for Rip Van Winkle and Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Edgar Allen Poe

• American author, poet, editor, and literary critic

• Part of the romantic movement

Thomas Cole

• American artist

• Founder of the Hudson River School (American art movement)

• Realistic and detailed portrayal of American landscape and wilderness with themes of romanticism

Frederic Church

• American landscape painter

• Central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters

• Largescale paintings with mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets

Charles Grandison Finney

• American Presbyterian minister and leader of the Second Great Awakening

• Father of Modern Revivalism and influential as a preacher

Joseph Smith

• American religious leader

• Founder of Mormonism

• Published the Book of Mormon

Brigham Young

• American leader in the Latter Day Saint movement (Mormon)

• Leader of Mormons after Joseph Smith was killed

Mother Ann Lee

• Leader of the Shakers

• Worshiped by dancing (shaking)

• Preached that sinfulness is avoided by keeping men and women seperate

• Experienced lots of resistance due to radical ideas

Robert Owen

• Social reformer and a founder of utopian socialism and cooperative movement

• Owen began a utopian New Harmony society

John Humphrey Noyes

• American preacher, radical religious philosopher, and utopian socialist

• Created the perfectionist Oneida Community

• Believed that Jesus had already returned