individualism
Word coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 to describe Americans as people no longer bound by social attachments to classes, castes, associations, and families. (p. 346)
American Rennaissance
A literary explosion during the 1840s inspired in part by Emerson's ideas on the liberation of the individual. (p. 346)
transcendentalism
A nineteenth-century intellectual movement that posited the importance of an ideal world of mystical knowledge and harmony beyond the immediate grasp of the senses. Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau called for the critical exa
utopias
Communities founded by reformers and transcendentalists to help realize their spiritual and moral potential and to escape from the competition of modern industrial society. (p. 349)
socialism
A system of social and economic organization based on the common ownership of goods or state control of the economy. (p. 351)
perfectionism
Christian movement of the 1830s that believed people could achieve moral perfection in their earthly lives because the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred. (p. 352)
Mormonism
The religion of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. After Smith's death at the hands of an angry mob, Brigham Young led many followers of Mormonism to lands in presentday Utah in 1846. (p. 352)
minstrelsy
Popular theatrical entertainment begun around 1830, in which white actors in blackface presented comic routines that combined racist caricature and social criticism. (p. 356)
abolitionism
The social reform movement to end slavery immediately and without compensation that began in the United States in the 1830s. (p. 357)
Underground Railroad
An informal network of whites and free blacks in the South that assisted fugitive slaves to reach freedom in the North. (p. 362)
amalgamation
A term for racial mixing and intermarriage, almost universally opposed by whites in the nineteenth-century United States. (p. 364)
gag rule
A procedure in the House of Representatives from 1836 to 1844 by which antislavery petitions were automatically tabled when they were received so that they could not become the subject of debate. (p. 365)
separate sphere
A term used by historians to describe the nineteenth-century view that men and women have different gender-defined characteristics and, consequently, that men should dominate the public sphere of politics and economics, while women should manage the priva
domestic slavery
A term referring to the assertion by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other female abolitionists that traditional gender roles and legal restrictions created a form of slavery for married women. (p. 370)
married women's property laws
Laws enacted between 1839 and 1860 in New York and other states that permitted married women to own, inherit, and bequeath property. (p. 371)
Seneca Falls Convention
The first women's rights convention in the United States. Held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, it resulted in a manifesto extending to women the egalitarian republican ideology of the Declaration of Independence. (p. 371)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
New England essayist and philosopher. He celebrated the liberation of the individual.
Henry David Thoreau
Heeded Emerson's call and sought inspiration from the natural world. In 1854, he published "Walden", or "Life in the Woods.
Margraet Fuller
She explored the possibilities of freedom for women. She published "Women in the Nineteenth Century.
Walt Whitman
Another responder to Emerson's call. Wrote "Leaves of Grass," a collection of wild.
Herman Melville
Explored the limits of individualism in even more extreme and tragic terms and emerged as a scathing critic of transcendentalism. He wrote "Moby Dick.
Nat Turner
A slave in Southampton County, Virginia. He led a rebellion were he killed at least 55 white men, women, and children.
William Lloyd Garrison
The most determined abolitionist. Worked on an antislavery newspaper, "Genius of Universal Emancipation.
Dorothea Dix
Model for women setting out to improve public institutions. She published 7 books, including "Conversations on Common Things.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Organized a gathering of women's right activists in the small New York town of Seneca Falls.
Susan B. Anthony
Quaker who had acquired political skills in the temperance and antislavery movements.