SP

The Second Great Awakening

Second Great Awakening

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  • American commitment to organized religion is weakend.

    • Preachers of this time rejected the Calvinistic belief the God predetrmined ones salvation or damnation (heaven vs. hell)
    • Emphasised individual responsibility for seeking salvation and that one could improve themselves and society

  • Charles Grandison Finney- preacher

  • Mainly Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterian

  • People must readmit God and Christ into their daily lives; all people could attain grace through faith

  • Revivalism- a tendency or desire to revive a former custom or practice (Religion in this case)

  • 4-5 days studied the Bible and examined souls

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American Writers

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  • Romanticism: feeling over reason, inner sipirtually over external rules, nature over environment created by humans

  • Transcendentalism: overcome the limits of the mind and let their soul reach out to embrace the beauty of the universe

    • Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Self-Reliance (Transcendetalism)

  • Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

  • Nathaniel Hawthore: The Scarlet Letter

  • Herman Melville: Moby Dick

  • Emily Dickinson: American Poet

  • Walt Whitman: O Captain, My Captain, Leaves of Grass

  • James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans; First American novelist

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Reformers and their Reforms

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Lyman Beecher- Presbyterian Minister

  • Temperance
    • Limit the amount of alcohol (moderation)
    • Alcohol can lead to the downfall of man

Horace Mann

  • Father of Education

  • Public Education

  • State board of education

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Utopia

  • Perfect society

  • Communist

    • Brook Farm- Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance”
    • Oneida-upstate NY
    • “Comples Marrige”
    • Shakers- communal ownership of good
    • Strict separation of the sexes in both work and life

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Reformers: Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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  • Advocated for women’s suffrage

  • Seneca Falls Convention : wrote the Declaration of Sentiments; all men and women were equal

    • Launched the modern women’s rights movement

  • Some changes did happen but overshadowed by slavery

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Dorothea Dix - Reformer

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  • Social Reformer

  • Concerned about the mentally ill in prisons

  • Worked to get public hospitals set up for the mentally ill

  • Focused on rehabilitation and treatment

  • Began her work in Massachusetts

  • Spread throughout the country

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