Big Ideas

• The Second Great Awakening, liberal social ideas from abroad, and Romantic beliefs in human perfectibility fostered the rise of voluntary organizations to promote religious and secular reforms, including abolition and women's rights.

• Various groups of American Indians, women, and religious followers developed cultures reflecting their interests and experiences, as did regional groups and an emerging urban middle class.

New Ideas: Liberalism in Religion

DEISM

• Less revelation, more reliance on reason

• Less Bible, more science

• But they believe in God

  • Gave human beings capacity for moral behavior

UNITARIANISM

• Spinoff from less extreme Puritanism of the past

• Humans have free will and the possibility of salvation by good works

  • God not as stern Creator, but loving father

• Contrast with hellfire doctrines of Calvinism

• Rejecting Predestination and human wickedness

Second Great Awakening

Reasons:

• Concern over lack of religious zeal

• Ideas of Deism and Unitarianism

Wave of revivals spread across the country

• Frontier "camp meetings"

• Charles Finney- revival preacher who leads revivals in New York area in 1830s

  • Against slavery and alcohol

• Numerous citizens converted

  • "Born again Christians"

  • Boosted church attendance

• New religious sects formed

Methodists and Baptists huge increase in numbers

• Stressed personal conversion (not predestination)

• Democratic control of church affairs

• Emotionalism in worship

• Increase in evangelicalism inspire reform efforts - Age of Reform

  • Prison Reform

  • Temperance

  • Wonem’s movement

  • Anti-slavery

• Key part of Second Great Awakening was the key role of women in religion

  • Majority of new church members

  • Women role of bringing family back to God

  • Inspired involvement in various other reform efforts

Mormons

• Joseph Smith- Creates Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

  • Travels to llinois

  • Murdered in 1844

• Brigham Young leads the followers to Utah in 1846-47

  • Develops a separate community ("New Zion")

  • Prosperous cooperative frontier community

  • Settlement increases by birthrate and immigrants from abroad (Missionary)

• Will not be admitted into the union until 1896

  • issue of polygamy (controversial topic)

Dorothy Dix

• Dorothy Dix - worked tirelessly to reform mental health treatment

• Traveled the country to document the problem

  • Leads to professional treatment for the mentally ill ix

Education Reform

• Tax supported schools were rare in early years of the republic

• Benefits of Public Education

  • Instill republican values

  • Instill values: discipline, hard work, etc.

  • Americanize immigrants

• Horace Mann- Secretary of Mass. Board of Education

  • Longer school terms

  • Compulsory attendance

  • Expanded curriculum

  • More schools

• North benefitted far more from education reforms

  • Illegal for black slaves to learn to read and write

Temperance Movement

• Drinking problems

  • Factory system needed efficient labor

  • Family life

  • Seen as immigrant issue (Irish and Germany drinking)

• American Temperance Society created in 1826

  • Urged members to stop drinking

  • Created propaganda to spread their “dry” message

- Move from temperance to legal prohibition

- Maine law of 1851

• Prohibited the manufacturer and sale of liquor

• Nationwide with 18th amendment

Women Resist

• Women were treated like second class citizens

  • Democratization did not apply to women

    • “Age of the Common Man”

• "Cult of domesticity” the home was a woman's special sphere

• Idea of "republican motherhood"

  • Mothers should raise children to be good citizens

• Women Reformers:

  • Inspired by Second Great Awakening

  • Demand rights for women, temperance movement, and the abolition of slavery

• Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton both advocated for suffrage for women

• Women's Rights: Seneca Falls Convention (1848)

  • Stanton read "Declaration of Sentiments"

  • All men and women are created equal"

  • Demand right to vote for women

  • Launched the modern women's rights movement

Women’s rights was overshadowed by abolitionist movement

Transcendentalism

• Truth, "transcends" the senses

  • Not just found by observation alone

• Every person possess an inner light that can illuminate the highest truth

• Ralph Waldo Emerson- stress self reliance, self improvement, and freedom.

  • “The American Scholar" in 1837 at Harvard challenged Americans to make their own art and culture

• Henry David Thoreau- "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (1849) & “Walden" (1854)

Utopian Communities

• Various movements to move away from conventional society and create a utopian community.

• Mormons: religious communal effort

• Brook Farm: communal transcendentalist experiment in Mass.

  • Secular, humanistic

• New Harmony: create a socialist type community that would be an answer to the problems presented by industrialization.