Religion, Reform, and Renaissance in Antebellum America (Very Important

Religion, Reform, and Renaissance in Antebellum America
Evangelical Protestant revivalism
-Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s (Finney and Cartwright), empowered the individual in finding religion, rise of new sects (Methodists and Baptists), Millennialism (end of times), Mormons, the South gained religion, linked with Jacksonian Democracy (empowering the common man)
Social Reforms
-Temperance (women involved), Prison Reform (Dix), Public Education (Horace Mann), Higher Education, Abolitionists, Women’s Movement (Seneca Falls)
Ideals of domesticity
-role of women moved from Republican Mothers to Cult of Domesticity (men responsible for economic and political affairs, separation of spheres, and women concentrated on the care of the home and children as well as moral leaders of the home and educators of children, domestic feminism led to involvement in social reforms
Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson (lyceums), Henry David Thoreau (Walden, On Civil Disobedience) Brook Farm, believed in individualism and abolition
Utopian Communities (Perfectionism
)
-Shakers, New Harmony, Mormons, Oneida Community, Fourier Phalanxes
American Renaissance: literary and artistic expression
-Painting (George Caleb Bingham drew common man experiences, Hudson River School (landscapes)
-Architecture (Greek Revival)
-Literature: James Fenimore Cooper (American writing about American experiences, Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Melville (Moby Dick), Transcendentalists (Emerson and Thoreau), writings became more nationalistic