Beginnings of Reform Movements

Second Great Awakening:

• Religious revival caused by a perceived drifting away from God
• Rejection of the Calvinist idea that God determines your fate and you have no control over it
• Emphasis on the individual seeking salvation and that people should improve themselves and society.
• Marked by emotional, fiery sermons

2^nd Great Awakening Cont’d

• Charles G. Finney is one of the leading preachers
• Centered around the Appalachian area of America
• Other Movements Spring off of the 2nd Great Awakening

2^nd Great Awakening Cont’d

• AME Zion church gets it start—provides spiritual guidance to blacks as well as providing outlets denied to them by whites such as schooling.
• Unitarian Movement—takes a more philosophical that spiritual approach to religion. Conscience and reason and the methods that individuals use to seek perfection. Emphasis on individual and social reform
• Mormons—Led west to Utah; believe in polygamy; persecuted
• Utopian Societies—reject regular society and try to create perfect society based on different beliefs—Shakers (No marriage/sex);

Transcendentalism

• A philosophical and literary movement that emphasized living a simple life.
• Celebrating the truth found in nature, personal emotion, and imagination.
• Rejected the institutionalized church as stifling self-expression
• Key Transcendentalists:
• Ralph Waldo Emerson—Wrote Nature and Self-Reliance
• Henry David Thoreau—Walden—preached civil disobedience and protest against unjust laws

Major Literary Movement

• Emphasizing the individual, their abilities and the common man
• Walt Whitman—Leaves of Grass
• Herman Melville—Moby Dick
• Nathaniel Hawthorne—Scarlet Letter
• Edgar Allen Poe—the Raven
• Alexis de Tocqueville—Democracy in America

Assignment

• Jigsaw Activity—You will be divided into a home group and given one of the reform movements.
• You will then go to a separate group and become an “expert” in the movement using textbook and primary sources
• Go back and teach the home group on your topic, based upon filling out the chart

Reform Movement

Issue

People Involved and what they did

To try to solve the issue.

Results

Temperance pg- 237-238

Prisons/Mentally Ill—pg 236

Prisons—pg 238

Public Education—238-239

Women’s Rights—240-241

Abolitionism—242-246

Work Place Reform--199

Honors Activity

• Biography in a Bag.
• Create a PowerPoint slide(s) with 10 documented images that show what your person wanted to do change society.

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Reformer

Area they Tried to Change

What they did to Improve Society

Sojourner Truth

Lyman Beecher

Dorthea Dix

William Lloyd Garrison

Theodore Weld

Sarah and Angelina Grimke

Frederick Douglass

Harriet Tubman

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Horace Mann

Nat Turner

Harriet Beecher Stowe

1. Temperance concerned the banning of alcohol from society
2. William L. Garrison was a strong supporter of women’s rights
3. Early strikes in factories were successful.
4. Dorthea Dix was able to establish better conditions for the mentally ill
5. Prisons began to try to rehabilitate prisoners instead of just lock them up.
6. Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave that spoke for temperance
7. Seneca Falls was a meeting that called for equal rights for women
8. Horace Mann called for a free public education system in all states.
9. Women were able to achieve the right to vote during this period of reforms.
10. The Grimke sisters supported women’s rights, abolitionism, and temperance.

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