APUSH Reform Movements – Flashcards

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Enlightenment era
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Influenced by the Enlightenment ideals of logic and reason, many Americans began to question certain elements of the Christian faith, embracing new rational views on religion. Proponents of rationalism held that religious beliefs should not simply be accepted but should instead be acquired through investigation and reflection. For most rationalists, the existence of God was proven most prominently by the orderly workings of nature, which hinted at a rational creator.
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The Second Great Awakening
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About seventy years after the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening emerged during the early 1800s, partly as a backlash against the spread of rationalism, and partly in response to calls for an organized religion more accessible to the common man. As in the First Great Awakening, revivalist ministers during the Second Great Awakening urged followers to reach a personal, emotional understanding of God. Women, blacks, and Native Americans participated heavily in the revival meetings. The revivals began in Connecticut in 1790. Unlike the revivals during the First Great Awakening, which were emotionally raucous and neared hysteria, these revivals were often calmer and quieter, as gatherers respectfully observed believers in prayer. In New England, these revivals spawned a movement to educate and reform America. Social activists, inspired by their renewed religious spirit, founded all sorts of evangelical and reform groups: the American Bible Society (1816), the Society for the Promotion of Temperance, abolition groups, and groups urging educational reform and women's rights. Religious fervor quickly spread to the West, where revivals more closely resembled the earlier, more animated revivals. In Kentucky and Tennessee, camp meetings were rowdy gatherings filled with dancing, singing, and shouting. The Methodists, who emphasized that religion was a matter of the heart rather an issue of logic, came to dominate frontier revivals. By 1845, Methodism was the most popular denomination of Protestantism in the U.S. While the Second Great Awakening made great strides toward converting a secularized American public, it was not without critics. Some claimed the revivals encouraged more lust than salvation. Unitarians criticized the emotional displays of the revivals and argued that goodness sprang from gradual character building, not sudden emotional conversion.
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Transcendentalism and Literature
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Along with the Second Great Awakening, other religious reform movements arose in the nineteenth century to challenge rationalism. One such movement was transcendentalism, which emerged during the 1830s. Transcendentalists argued that knowledge did not come exclusively through the intellect, but also through the senses, intuition, and sudden insight. They believed that concepts such as God, freedom, and absolute truth were inborn and could be accessed through inner experience and emotional openness.
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Mormonism
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as Mormonism, was the most controversial challenge to traditional religion. Its founder, Joseph Smith, claimed that God and Jesus Christ appeared to him and directed him to a buried book of revelation. The Book of Mormon, similar in form and style to the Bible, tells of the descendants of a sixth century B.C.E. prophet whose family founded a civilization in South America. Violent religious persecution forced Mormons to move steadily westward in search of land upon which to establish a perfect spiritual community. After Smith's murder in Illinois, a new leader, Brigham Young, led the Mormons to present-day Utah, where they have since prospered.
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Abolitionism
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Perhaps the most prominent and controversial reform movement of the period was abolitionism, the anti-slave movement. Although abolitionism had attracted many followers in the revolutionary period, the movement lagged during the early 1800s. By the 1830s, the spirit of abolitionism surged, especially in the Northeast. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison launched an abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, earning himself a reputation as the most radical white abolitionist. Whereas past abolitionists had suggested blacks be shipped back to Africa, Garrison worked in conjunction with prominent black abolitionists, including Fredrick Douglass, to demand equal civil rights for blacks. Garrison's battle cry was "immediate emancipation," but he recognized that it would take years to convince enough Americans to oppose slavery. To spread the abolition fervor, he founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. By 1840, these organizations had spawned more than 1,500 local chapters. Even so, abolitionists were a small minority in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, often subjected to jeering and physical violence
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Women's Rights
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The position of American women in the early 1800s was legally and socially inferior to men. Women could not vote and, if married, could not own property or retain their own earnings. The reform movements of the 1830s, specifically abolition and temperance, gave women a chance to get involved in the public arena. Women reformers soon began to agitate not just for temperance and abolition, but also for women's rights
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Public Education
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The movement to reform public schools began in rural areas, where one-room schoolhouses provided only minimal education. School reformers hoped to improve education so that children would become responsible citizens sharing common cultural values. Extending the right to vote to all free males no doubt helped galvanize the movement, since politicians began fearing the affects of an illiterate, ill-educated electorate.
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Temperance
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The production and consumption of alcohol in the United States rose markedly in the early 1800s. The temperance movement emerged as a backlash against the rising popularity of drinking. Founded in 1826, the American Temperance Society advocated total abstinence from alcohol. Many advocates saw drinking as an immoral and irreligious practice that caused poverty or mental instability. Others saw it as a male indulgence that harmed women and children who often suffered abuse at drunkards' hands. During the 1830s, an increasing number of workingmen joined the movement in concern over the ill effects of alcohol on job performance. By 1835, about 5,000 temperance societies were affiliated with the American Temperance Society. Owing largely to this association's impact, consumption of liquor began to decrease in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and many states passed restrictions or bans on the sale of alcohol.
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Prisons, Poorhouses, and Asylums
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Beginning in the 1820s, social activists pressed for prison reform. These reformers argued that prisons, instead of simply confining criminals, should focus on rehabilitation through instruction, order, and discipline. Believing crime was largely the result of childhood neglect and trauma, prison reformers hoped that such methods would counteract the effects of a poor upbringing and effectively purge criminals of their violent and immoral tendencies. Further rehabilitative efforts were directed at the poor and the insane. To combat poverty, almshouses were built for poor invalids. Workhouses were built for the able-bodied poor in the hopes that a regimented environment would turn them into productive citizens. Until the early 1840s, the insane were confined in these poorhouses or in prisons, living in miserable conditions that often exacerbated their illnesses. In 1843, Dorothea Dix, a Massachusetts schoolteacher, described to the state legislature the conditions of the insane in prison and encouraged the construction of insane asylums to better rehabilitate the mentally ill. In the following years, asylums opened throughout the United States.
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Utopian Communities
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The most extreme reform movement in the United States was the utopian movement, founded in the first half of the 1800s on the belief that humans could live perfectly in small experimental societies. Though utopian communities varied in their philosophies, most were designed and founded by intellectuals as alternatives to the competitive economy. Utopian communities aimed to perfect social relationships; reform the institutions of marriage and private property; and balance political, occupational, and religious influences. Most utopian communities did not last beyond the early 1850s, but one, the Oneida community in New York, survived from 1848 to 1881.
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Manufacturing in the North
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Manufacturing first took hold in New England. The region's poor soil made large-scale farming unprofitable, and its extensive waterways and steady influx of immigrants favored the development of manufacturing—the waterways supplied power for mills and facilitated trade, while the immigrants comprised a nearly inexhaustible labor supply. Small New England mills gave way to larger, more productive ones, and the expansion of foreign markets allowed the factory system to blossom. Factories became the center of planned towns designed to accommodate the needs of the factory owners and workers
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Cotton and Slavery in the South
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The South took a very different economic course than the North. After the Revolution, when tobacco income plummeted, cotton reinvigorated the stagnant southern economy. The widespread use of the cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, made cotton plantations efficient and profitable. The demand for cotton also grew because of the developing textile industries in the North and in Britain. Cotton plantations spread across the South, and by 1850, the southern U.S. grew more than 80 percent of the world's cotton. As the cotton-based economy boomed so did slavery, since slaves were needed to man the large-scale and labor-intensive plantations. Although Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808, the smuggling of slaves continued until the 1850s, and the southern slave population doubled between 1810 and 1830. Three-quarters of these slaves worked on cotton plantations, while the remainder worked a variety of skilled and unskilled jobs. The rise in slavery led to the development of a slave culture, and also to an increasing, though generally unfounded, fear of slave revolts. Various slave uprisings did occasionally erupt, however—most notably, Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia in 1831. The South became a veritable "Cotton Kingdom," remaining rural and agrarian while the North became industrialized. Rich plantation owners saw little reason to spend their capital on risky industrial projects when cash crops brought in a large, steady income.
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The Blossoming of American Literature
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During the early 1800s, American literature began to divide from its British roots. Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper helped carve out the early territory of American literature, using distinctly American literary themes. Washington Irving achieved international acclaim, writing often satirical accounts of life in colonial New York. Two of his most famous stories are "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." James Fenimore Cooper, the author of The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826), is credited with creating the first western hero. In "The American Scholar" (1837), Ralph Waldo Emerson lauded such American literary advances and urged American authors to continue setting their own course. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe emerged in the late 1840s and early 1850s as prominent writers of fiction. They portrayed individuals as conflicted and obsessive, proud and guilt-ridden. In The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, Hawthorne explores the moral dilemmas of an adulterous Puritan minister. Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) portrays a sea captain's tortured obsession. Poe's macabre short stories and poems, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) and "The Raven" (1844), examine depravity and moral corruption. Prominent essayists and poets also emerged during the 1840s and 1850s. Two of the most renowned essayists were the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (discussed in the Transcendentalism section), who favored emotion and intuition over pure logic. The poet Walt Whitman, a follower of Emerson, celebrated America for producing a new type of democratic man uncorrupted by European vice in his compilation of poems, Leaves of Grass, published in 1855.
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