I. Why do the changes in society and technology cause an urge to reform society and literature?
A. What were the causes of the religious flowering in the Second Great Awakening?
1. Age of Reason
2. Unitarianism and Deists- a backlash against the First Great Awakening?
3. In what ways is the 2nd Great Awakening a response to the Enlightenment or rationalism?
B. What was revivalism? How does this compare to the First Great Awakening?
The “Burned-Over District,” millenarianism, camp meetings and “getting saved”
C. Key figures and groups
Circuit riders, Unitarians, Peter Cartwright, Charles Finney, Millerites, Mormons
D. Education as a further goad to democracy
Primary: Horace Mann, Noah Webster, McGuffey’s Readers
Post-secondary: U of Virginia, Troy Female Seminary, Oberlin College, Mt. Holyoke
Lyceum and critical magazines
E. Treatment of criminals and the mentally ill
Dorothea Dix
II. . What factors lead to women being newly empowered?
A. reaction against “cult of domesticity”
B. Key figures
1. Lucretia Mott
2. Elizabeth Stanton
3. Susan B. Anthony
4. Lucy Stone
5. Grimke’ sisters
C. Senesca Falls Convention
1. Summarize the “Declaration of Causes and Sentiments”
III. Can paradise be created on earth?
A. The Utopian movements and the Transcendentalists
Brook Farm, Shakers, Oneida Community
Emerson, Thoreau, “Self- Reliance,”
B. Prohibition and temperance
Neal Dow and the Maine Law of 1851
C. How does this idealism contrast with trends in American literature and art?
the “Knickerbocker” group, Cooper, Irving, Whitman, Whittier, Lowell, Oliver W. Holmes, Alcott, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
Historians Bancroft, Parkman, and Prescott
D. Transcendentalism– explain the basic beliefs
1. Emerson
2. Thoreau
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