Chapter 15 Terms and Definitions
- Second Great Awakening
A powerful wave of Protestant religious revivalism in the early 1800s that emphasized personal salvation and fueled numerous reform movements.
- Charles Grandison Finney
The era's most influential revivalist preacher, famous for emotional camp-meeting revivals in New York's "burned-over district."
- Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
A new American religious movement founded by Joseph Smith in 1830; facing persecution, the Mormons migrated west under Brigham Young to Utah.
- Horace Mann
Massachusetts education reformer who championed tax-supported public schools, longer school terms, and better-trained teachers.
- Dorothea Dix
Reformer who exposed the horrific treatment of the mentally ill and successfully campaigned for the construction of specialized asylums.
- Temperance Movement
A reform crusade against alcohol abuse that culminated in Maine's 1851 statewide prohibition law, the first of its kind.
- Seneca Falls Convention
The first women's rights convention (1848), organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, which issued the Declaration of Sentiments.
- Declaration of Sentiments
The 1848 document, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, demanding legal, economic, and voting rights for women.
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A principal organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention and one of the era's leading advocates for women's rights.
- Utopian Communities
Experimental communal societies, such as Brook Farm and the Oneida Community, founded to test new ideas about labor, property, and social organization.
- Brook Farm
A short-lived Massachusetts utopian community (founded 1841) that gathered transcendentalist writers and thinkers to share labor and intellectual life.
- William Lloyd Garrison
Abolitionist publisher of the newspaper The Liberator (1831), which demanded the immediate and total abolition of slavery.
- Frederick Douglass
An escaped enslaved man who became abolitionism's most powerful orator and writer, publishing the newspaper the North Star.
- Abolitionism
The reform movement demanding an end to slavery, ranging from moderate gradualism to Garrison's radical call for immediate emancipation.
- Transcendentalism
A philosophical and literary movement, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, emphasizing self-reliance, individualism, and spiritual communion with nature.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Leading transcendentalist thinker and essayist who urged Americans toward intellectual independence and self-reliance.
- Henry David Thoreau
Transcendentalist writer known for his experiment in simple living at Walden Pond and his essay "Civil Disobedience," advocating resistance to unjust laws.