1. Chapter 15 Overview

2. The Second Great Awakening
1800s-1830s
Emphasized the importance of religion
Reaction against declining church membership and deism
Emphasized emotion over reason
Used camp meetings (revival meetings)
Emphasis on the ability of an individual to earn salvation (as opposed to predestination)
Led to the growing popularity of new denominations
Actively sought female participation

3. Charles Grandison Finney
"America's foremost revivalist"
Encouraged women
Innovative techniques
Humans can earn salvation
Abolitionist

4. Camp Meetings
The camp meeting is a phenomenon of American frontier Christianity. The "camp meeting" was a response to the lack of established churches on the frontier. Word of mouth told that there was to be a religious meeting at a certain location. Due to the primitive means of transportation, if this meeting was to be more than a few miles' distance from those attending, it would necessitate their leaving home for its entire duration, or as long as they desired to remain, and camping out at or near its site. Unlike traditional religious events these meetings could provide their participants with almost continuous services; once one speaker was finished (often after several hours) another would often rise to take his place.

6. New Sects & Denominations
Baptists & Methodists grew the most
Other Examples:
Millerites (Adventists)—Jesus would return on October 22, 1844
Unitarians—Jesus was not divine
Mormons—New American scriptures

7. Reform Movements
Partly inspired by the Second Great Awakening, Americans began to look for new ways to improve society.

8. Temperance Opposed excessive (and sometimes any) alcohol consumption
American Temperance Society (1826)
Northern states experimented with prohibition laws in the 1850s.

9. Public Schools
Reformers believed that better organized schools were needed to cope with growing industrialism and immigration.
Horace Mann advocated 1) state funded schools, 2) assigning students to specific grades, 3) longer school years, 4) required attendance, and 5) standardized text books.
In 1852 Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school attendance law.

10. Horace Mann

11. Abolition Sought the abolition of slavery
Some favored immediate, uncompensated abolition
Others favored gradual forms of abolition
William Lloyd Garrison
Frederick Douglass

12. Abolitionists

13. Women’s Rights Lucretia Mott & Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Seneca Falls Convention (1848) Declaration of Sentiments

14. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

15. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.
He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.
He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.

16. Things have changed…

17. Asylums
Dorothea Dix:
Champion of better treatment on the mentally ill.

18. Prisons Debtors prisons were being abolished
Capital punishment was being used less frequently
Brutal punishments (whipping, branding) were being eliminated
Prisons were to reform as well as punish

19. Utopias Experiments in cooperative communities
Over 40 utopian communities were set up