Reform Terms

The basic aims of romanticism were: a return to nature and to belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery of the artist as a supremely individual creator; the development of nationalistic pride; and the exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect. It was also a philosophical revolt against rationalism.

• Group of American landscape painters, working from 1825 to 1875.
• Introduced landscape painting instead of portrait painting.

• Prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He was a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking.
• Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, which many consider to be his masterpiece.

• American author who is considered one of the great American writers and a major figure in world literature.
• He wrote Moby Dick, which was a tale of tradgety, something new to American literature at the time.

• American poet, short-story writer, and critic.
• He is acknowledged today as one of the most brilliant and original writers in American literature. He is also considered the father of the modern detective story.

Philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world.

• American poet and essayist.
• Through his essays, poems, and lectures, the "Sage of Concord" established himself as a leading spokesman of transcendentalism and as a major figure in American literature.

• Essay written by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• It contains the most solid statement of one of Emerson's repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas.

• American author and naturalist. He was a supreme individualist and championed the human spirit against materialism and social conformity.
• He is considered one of the most influential figures in American thought and literature.

• An eloquent account of his experiment in near-solitary living in close harmony with nature.
• It's an expression of his transcendentalist philoshy.

• Essay by Henry David Thoreau.
• It argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice.

• Term used to define the first currents of modern socialist thought and is most often applied to those utopian socialists who lived in the first quarter of the 19th century.
• Utopian socialists were important in the formation of modern movements for intentional community and cooperatives.

• Experimental farm at West Roxbury, Mass., based on cooperative living.
• Each member was to take part in the manual labor in an attempt to make the group self-sufficient.

• American literary critic and author.After graduating from Harvard Divinity School in 1826, he entered the Unitarian ministry.
• He was one of the leaders of the transcendentalists and a contributor to their magazine, the Dial.

British social reformer and socialist, pioneer in the cooperative movement.

• Town on the Wabash River; founded 1814 by the Harmony Society under George Rapp. In 1825 the Harmonists sold their holdings to Robert Owen and moved to Economy, Pa., where their sect survived into the early 1900s.
• Owen established a communistic colony in New Harmony that gained prominence as a cultural and scientific center and attracted many noted scientists, educators, and writers.

• American reformer. He studied theology at Yale but lost his license to preach because of his "perfectionist" doctrine.
• He founded the Oneida community.

• Utopian religious community founded by John H. Noyes in Oneida, N.Y., in 1848. Noyes, who believed that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ had occurred in AD 70, and his disciples formed their first religious society in Putney, Vt., in 1841 in order to establish the millennial kingdom.
• First emergence of polygamy.

• American writer and lecturer
• She was one of the most influential personalities of her day in American literary circles.

A member of the Shakers; who, during the 1770s, emigrated from England to Watervliet, New York due to persecution. The method of worship she and others followed was one of ecstatic

• Worship: One of ecstatic dancing or "shaking", which dubbed them as the Shaking Quakers.
• After reaching the New World, they were known as Shakers.

• Religious leader.
• Founded the Mormon church in 1830.

• Man decendants of NE Puritans settled in upstate NY.
• Serious religious revivals occurred.

Founded in 1826 in Boston as part of a growing effort by reformers to limit alcohol consumption.

• Founded by evangelical women in 1834.
• One of the earliest and most successful anti-prostitution groups.

• American clergyman who advocated health and vegetarianism.
• Graham crackers.

• Dentist.
• Developed anesthesia to use in surgery.

• US educator.
• Reformed public education.

Best known for his widely used schoolbooks.

• Major force in American Culture.
• Cooperation mission and reform society.

• Rights activist on behalf of mentally ill patients.
• Created the first wave of mental asylums.

• Idealized view of women at home.
• Women: self-less caregiver to the children; refuge for husband.

First college to accept women and Af-Am students.

• Founded the first college for women in 1837.
• Mount Holyhoke Femal Seminary.

• 19th-century American Quakers, educators and writers who were early advocates of abolitionism and women's rights.
• Also became early activists in women's rights movements.

Renowned for her forthright opinions on women’s education as well as her vehement support of kindergarten into children’s education.

• American author and abolitionist, whose novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) attacked the cruelty of slavery
• It reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the U.S. and Britain.

• American author. Mostly educated by her father, she was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau, and her first book, Flower Fables (1854), was a collection of tales originally created to amuse Emerson's daughter. Worked as a servant and a seamstress before she made her fortune as a writer.
• Her letters written to her family when she was a Civil War nurse were published as Hospital Sketches.

• Novel by American author Louisa May Alcott.
• It has been adapted to play, musical, opera, film, and animated feature.

• American Quaker minister, abolitionist, social reformer and proponent of women's rights.
• She is credited as the first American " feminist" in the early 1800s but was actually the initiator of women's political advocacy.

U.S. suffragist; wife of Henry Brown Blackwell.

American reformer, a leader of the woman-suffrage movement.

• Prominent American civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the 19th century women's rights movement to introduce women's suffrage into the United States.
• She traveled the United States and Europe, and gave 75 to 100 speeches per year on women's rights for 45 years.

• Held in Seneca Falls, New York on July 19 to July 20, 1848, was the first women's rights convention held in the United States.
• Prominent at the 1848 convention were leading reformers, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

• was articulated by Stephen A. Douglas at the second of the Lincoln-Douglas debates on August 27, 1858, in Freeport, Illinois. Lincoln tried to force Douglas to choose between the principle of popular sovereignty proposed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the United States Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which stated that slavery could not legally be excluded from the territories.
• Douglas' response stated that despite the court's ruling, slavery could be prevented from any territory by the refusal of the people living in that territory to pass laws favorable to slavery. Likewise, if the people of the territory supported slavery, legislation would provide for its continued existence.

• American abolishionist.
• An ardent abolitionist (he once kept a station on the Underground Railroad at Richmond, Pa.) and a believer in the equality of the races, Brown settled (1855) with five of his sons in Kansas to help win the state for freedom.