Underlying causes of reform
" nation was growing in geographical extent, population diversity, & economic complexity
" romanticism rested on the basic goodness of the human spirit & society's responsibility to unleash it
" desire for restoration of discipline & stability

Rise of American culture
" paintings focused on wild, untamed nature- artists of the Hudson River School painted Hudson Valley, Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Rockies, etc.
" James Fenimore Cooper evoked the American wilderness & the challenges of the frontier
" Walt Whitman's poems celebrated democracy & the unleashing of emotion
" emergence of historical romances & crude realistic literature in the South

Transcendentalists
" Reason was the individual's capacity to grasp beauty & truth- highest human faculty- people should strive for this
" Understanding was use of intellect- involved repression of instinct
" Ralph Waldo Emerson stressed communion with nature, American cultural independence, & exploration of spirit
" Henry David Thoreau advocated "civil disobedience," or "passive resistance"

Utopian Societies
" Brook Farm: led by Boston transcendentalist George Ripley- communal labor & leisure (gave positive connotation to leisure)- individualism gave rise to socialism
" New Harmony: led by Robert Owen - to be a "Village of Cooperation" where everyone lived in perfect equality- failed economically

Temperance
" evangelical Protestantism added major strength to crusade vs. drunkenness
" women especially active- claimed husbands spent all their money on alcohol & that it caused them to beat their wives
" American Society for the Promotion of Temperance (1826) & Washington  Temperance Society (1840)
" battle over prohibition laws pitted established Protestants vs. Catholic  immigrants

Educational Reform
" Horace Mann (secretary of Massachusetts Board of Education)- lengthened academic year, doubled teachers' salaries, introduced new training for teachers
" principle of tax-supported elementary schools supported in all the states
" all Southern blacks barred from formal education
" efforts by missionaries & others to educate Native Americans
" Benevolent Empire: institutions to help the handicapped

Rehabilitation movements
" asylums for criminals & the mentally ill- horrible conditions
" penitentiaries & mental institutions designed to provide proper environment
" rigid prison discipline, solitary confinement, & silent work crews- designed to rid criminals of laxness that had led them astray
" orphanages, almshouses, & workhouses created to help the poor and helpless

Reservation system
" reservation: enclosed region in which Indians could live in isolation from white society
" basically a form of relocation with an attempt at "regeneration" of the Indian race

Feminism
" (1848) first Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, NY: led by Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, & Susan B. Anthony
" Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions launched movement for female suffrage, as well as rejection of separate spheres
" many feminists were Quakers
" feminism was secondary concern to abolitionism

Abolition
" William Lloyd Garrison: demanded the immediate, unconditional, universal abolition of slavery, wanted to extend to blacks all the rights of American citizenship, founded the Liberator in Boston, became leader of most radical faction of the American Antislavery Society
" David Walker urged slaves to rise up & kill their "masters"
" Frederick Douglass: founded the North Star in NY, demanded full social & economic equality
" American Antislavery Society fractured on lines of female participation, immediate emancipation vs. moral suasion, etc.
" Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin