Reforms in 19 th Century America

The Second Great Awakening 1.Was a broad religious movement that swept the US after The preachers of this period rejected the ideal of predestination, meaning that God had already decided at birth where a person would end up in the afterlife. 3.They emphasized individual responsibilities for seeking salvation, and the insisted that people improve themselves and society. 4.Christian churches split up over these ideas and various denominations arose (ex. Baptists and Methodists).

Revivalism 1.Revival: An emotional meeting designed to awaken religious faith through impassioned preaching and prayer. 2.A revival might last 4 or 5 days. 3.During those days the participants studied their Bibles and examined their souls.

Revivalism 4.Revivalism swept across America in the early 19 th century. 5.It had a strong impact on the public. a.1800: 1 in 15 Americans belonged to a church b.1850: 1 in 6 Americans belonged to a church.

The African-American Church 1.The SGA also brought Christianity to enslaved African Americans on a large scale. 2.There was a democratic impulse in these new churches that said everyone, black or white, belonged to the same God. 3.Many Baptist and Methodist churches allowed whites and blacks. 4.Segregation was in effect in many churches however.

Christianity to the Slave 1.Those slaves that attended these churches viewed Christianity differently than their masters. 2.They interpreted the Christian message as a promise of freedom for their people. 3.In the east many free African Americans had their own all-black churches.

Christianity to the Slave 4.A popular African American church was the African Methodist Episcopal Church. 5.The African-American church gave its members a deep inner faith, a strong sense of community, and the spiritual support to oppose slavery.

The First Black National Convention 1.The African-American church developed a political voice and in 1830 they held the first black national convention in Philadelphia. 2.The participants discussed the possible settlement of free African Americans and fugitive slaves in Canada. 3.This convention would be the first of what would become an annual convention of free blacks in the North.

Transcendentalism 1.Transcendentalism: a philosophical and literary movement that emphasized living a simple life and celebrated the truth found in nature and in personal emotion and imagination. 2.It spawned a literary movement that stressed American ideas of optimism, freedom, and self-reliance. 3.Famous writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau put these skills into practice.

Henry David Thoreau 1.He believed in the importance of individual conscience, he urged people to resist laws they considered unjust. 2.This form of protest is called civil disobedience. 3.He did not want to support the paying of taxes for war so he even went to jail.

Unitarianism 1.Emphasized reason and appealed to conscience as the path to perfection. 2.In New England Unitarians attracted wealthy and educated followers. 3.Believed conversion to Christianity was a gradual process. 4.Agreed with revivalists that individual and social reform were both possible and important.

Utopian Communities 1.Utopian Communities: experimental groups who tried to create a “utopia,” or perfect place. 2.These communities varied in their philosophies and living arrangements but shared common goals such as self-efficiency. 3.Some of the best-known ones were in New Harmony, Indiana and Brook Farm, near Boston. 4.Most of these communities failed within a few years of starting. New Harmony

Shaker Communities 1.Religious community that followed the teachings of Ann Lee. 2.Set up their first communities in New York, New England, and on the frontier. 3.They shared their goods with each other, believed that men and women were equal, and refused to fight for any reason

Shaker Communities 4.When you joined you vowed not to marry or have children. 5.To increase their communities they adopted children or by converts ’s: 6000 Shakers1999: 7 Shakers

Prisons and Asylums 1.Reform reached far and wide an eventually reached the prison and asylum system. 2.When a French writer named Alexis de Tocqueville toured the US in 1831 he remarked that the prison system was “the spectacle of the most complete despotism [rigid and sever control].” 3.Dorothea Dix was one of the major reformers. 4.She had witnessed the horrors inmates faced in US prisons, and she was horrified to discover that jails usually housed mentally ill people.

Dorothea Dix 1.In 1843 she sent a report of her findings to the MA legislature, who then passed a law aimed at improving prison conditions. 2.Between 1845 and 1852 she convinced nine Southern states to set up public hospitals for the mentally ill. 3.She emphasized the idea of rehabilitation, treatment that might reform the sick or imprisoned person to a useful position in society.