A leading feminist addressing the problems of gender roles was transcendentalist
Margaret Fuller
The Oneida Community became controversial because of its rejection of what it called the
demands of male lust
Shakers advocated
celibacy and equality of the sexes
Founder of the Mormon Faith
Joseph Smith
The Mormons responded to the hostility they encountered by
migrating to the West
The Mormons based their ideas for society on the importance of the
family.
Members of the temperance movement agreed
abstinence should promote the moral self-improvement of individuals.
Nonscientific theories for improving mental and physical health did not include
fasting
Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ignaz Semmelweiss believed that
diseases could be transmitted from one person to another
Before the civil war, the US education system had
helped to achieve one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
Horace Mann was the chief leader in the movement for
public education
The asylum movement incorporated the principle of
firm, yet humane, treatment to rehabilitate the criminal and insane
Reformers believed the future of Native Americans was
reservations
Antebellum feminists were generally
active in other reforms too
The Seneca Falls convention of 1848 promoted
women's rights
Antislavery movement plan called for the
colonization of freed slaves in Africa
William Lloyd Garrison urged
immediate, unconditional abolition of slavery, without compensation to slaveowners.
Before the civil war, Northern blacks
were generally limited to the most menial jobs
In North, majority population reacted to abolitionists by
treating them as a threat to society, even doing them bodily harm
In antebellum North, the abolotionist movement
attracted some support, but also some frequent mob violence
Northerners regarded abolitionists as
dangerous, fanatical revolutionaries
William Llyod Garrison alienated his supporters by
adopting radical positions on many issues
Antislavery sentiment underlay the formation in 1840 of the
liberty party
chief objective of "free soil
to keep slavery and blacks out of the federal territories
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin
inflamed passions over sectional differences regarding slavery
Slavery question became more important because the
nation was expanding to the West
Manifest Dynasty motive for expansion was to
extend American liberty to new territories
In the mid-1800s, the reform impulse in US included the idea that
man is essentially good and capable of positive change.
The cultural nationalism of American intellectuals of the 1800s generally
celebrated the uniqueness of the American democratic spirit.
The best-known novels of James Fenimore Cooper featured tales of the
frontiersmen in the American wilderness
Walt Whitman expressed his love of American democracy and individuality by means of
poetry
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Edgar Allen Poe's works emphasized the theme of the
significance of pain and horror
The leading Southern novelists of the 1830s and 1840s wrote
romantic eulogies of the plantation system
The transcendentalists called for
the use of emotion and intuition to go beyond the confines of understanding
Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist philosophy did not include
rejection of the existence of God
American writer who suggested that American culture and artistic development could come from the instinctive creative genius was
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau argued that it was necessary for individuals to
practice civil disobedience when laws were unjust.
Book Farm was noted for its
attempt at utopian communal living