Unit 6
Chapters 11
Irish/BHS
Fall, 2013
Chapter 11-The Pursuit of Perfection, 1801-1850
How did the evangelical revivalism of the early nineteenth century
spur reform movements?
1. Second Great Awakening

Evangelical Protestant religious revival

Reaction AGAINST the growth of Catholicism, as well
as the Enlightenment, deism, Unitarianism, and other
secular or liberal religious ideas.

Causes and Effects?
2. Camp meetings – Characteristics and Effects?
3. Circuit riders
4. Peter Cartwright
5. Second Great Awakening in the South and on the Frontier vs.
Second Great Awakening in the North – Be able to compare and
contrast.
6. Timothy Dwight
7. The Enlightenment
8. deism
9. Unitarians
10. Nathaniel Taylor
11. Lyman Beecher
12. Charles G. Finney

“burned-over district” of western and central New
York (*see class notes)
13. Causes and Effects of the Second Great Awakening
14. Social Reform Movements

Effects on the middle class

Role of women – “feminization of religion” (*see class
notes)
15. Temperance Movement

Effectiveness? Successes? Limitations or Failures?

Neal S. Dow and the Maine Law (*see class notes.)
What was the doctrine of “separate spheres,” and how did it
change family life?
16. Changing roles within the American family?

New family dynamics?

Weakening of traditional parental role

Changes in marriage

Doctrine or ideology of “separate spheres”

Cult of Domesticity or the “Cult of True Womanhood”

Changing status of women?

“domestic feminism”

Catharine Beecher

“century of the child” / “child-centered” family

age of moral perfectionism

Changes to the family structure (i.e. smaller size of
families)
How did Horace Mann change ideas about public schooling in
America?
17. Characteristics of Public Education in the 1820s and 1830s?
18. Education Reform and Horace Mann (aka “The Father of Public
Education”)

Compulsory Attendance Laws (positives and
negatives?)

“Protestant Ethic”

McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers

Free Public Schools, Lyceums, Debating Societies, and
Mechanics’ Institutes
19. Asylums, Prisons, and Poorhouses
20. Dorothea Dix
What were some of the major antebellum reform movements?
21. Radical Reforms

Perfectionism

Split in the Temperance Society

American Peace Society, New England NonResistance Society, and absolute pacifism
22. Abolitionist Movement

American Colonization Society

William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator

American Anti-Slavery Society

Theodore Dwight Weld

Elijah Lovejoy

Reasons for resistance to abolition in the North

The Liberty Party

Black Abolitionists
o Frederick Douglass and the North Star
o Sojourner Truth
o Negro Convention Movement
o David Walker and his Appeal … to the
Colored Citizens of the World.
o Harriet Tubman and the Underground
Railroad

Southern Resistance to Abolition?
o “gag rule,” 1836
o Refusal by the post office to carry
antislavery literature into the slave states.

Grimké Sisters

Influence on Women’s Rights?
23. Women’s Rights / Suffrage Movement

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Seneca Falls Convention & The Declaration of
Sentiments, 1848
24. Utopian Socialist Communities and the idea of “perfectionism”

Robert Owen – New Harmony

Mother Ann Lee – the Shakers

John Humphrey Noyes-Oneida Community

George Ripley-Brooke Farm
25. Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller)
26. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s skepticism toward “perfectionism”
Unit 6
Chapters 11
Irish/BHS
Fall, 2013
Chapter 11-The Pursuit of Perfection, 1801-1850