Chapter #15 – Reform and Culture

Chapter Themes:

The spectacular religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening reversed a trend toward secular rationalism in American culture, and helped to fuel a spirit of social reform.

The spirit of optimism and reform affected nearly all areas of American life and culture, including education, the role of women and family, and literature and the arts.

I. Religion

A. Revivals

1. Shakers

2. Unitarianism

3. Mormons

4. Millerites

5. Deism

B. Social Reform

1. American Temperance Society – Neal Dow

2. Women’s Right’s Convention –

a. Lucretia Mott

b. Elizabeth Cady Stanton

c. Dorothea Dix

d. Emma Willard

II. Education

A. Horace Mann

B. Noah Webster

III. Culture

A. National Literature - transcendentalism

1. Washington Irving

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes

3. James Fenimore Cooper

4. Edgar Allen Poe

5. Nathaniel Hawthorne

6. Henry David Thoreau

7. Herman Melville

8. Walt Whitman

9. Henry W. Longfellow

B. Artists

1. Gilbert Stuart

2. John Greenleaf Whittier

3. John J. Audubon

C. Other

1. Phineas T. Barnum

2. Horace Greeley