What's crack-a-lackin'A-Push people? Today we're going to take a look at the Age of Reform from 1790 to 1860. If you're reading any of these three A-Push books, we got you covered because we're going to review all the good stuff in each one of those. So let's take a look at the big ideas today.
What the heck does it all mean? That's why you're here. So, one important point is... There's going to be this liberalism in religion. In fact, as a result of the Enlightenment, which was going on way before the American Revolution, there's these new ideas such as deism.
And this idea of deism is less revelation, more reliance on reason. Less Bible, more science. Now, these two people do believe in God, but they feel that human beings have the capacity for moral behavior. It doesn't need to all come from religion.
And another kind of idea that's kind of... in some ways threatening traditional religious views of the world is Unitarianism. Unitarianism is a spinoff from the less extreme Puritanism of the past. This idea that humans, in a Unitarian view, have free will and the possibility of salvation by good works.
Whereas, if you live a good life and you choose to do things right, you can be saved. This is different than traditional views where God is seen as the stern creator. but rather he's a loving father. And it's a contrast with the kind of hellfire doctrines of Calvinism. So these ideas are really challenging traditional religious views in the late 1700s, early 1800s.
And these individuals are rejecting predestination and this idea of human wickedness. So what you see happening is around the 1790s, a second great awakening occurring. And if the first one was a response to the Enlightenment, the second one is a concern over a lack of religious zeal amongst American citizens and these ideas that we just discussed.
And so what is it? Well, beginning in the 1790s, you start to have these wave of revivals spreading across the country, these frontier camp meetings like you see in the picture right there, where these preachers would come, such as Charles Finney, who was a revival preacher. who leads the revivals in the New York area in the 1830s. And this guy is against slavery.
He's also against the drinking of alcohol. And he's really one of the lead figures of the Second Great Awakening, but there's a lot. And during this period, numerous citizens are converted. In fact, they're kind of referred to as born-again Christians. And attendance in church dramatically increases.
You have new religious sects formed. And two of the big ones are the Methodist and the Baptist. Huge increase in their numbers. And these two particular groups stress personal conversion.
Once again, not predestination. You have this personal conversion. And this gives you a democratic control of church affairs.
There's much more of a democratic nature amongst the Methodist or Baptist congregations. And a key aspect of this is this emotionalism in worship. Some other things about the Great Awakening you should keep in mind is there is this increase in evangelicalism, this very emotional form of worship. And this is going to inspire reform efforts during this age of reform. Things like prison reform, temperance, the women's movement, anti-slavery, partly is going to be inspired by this Second Great Awakening.
Another key part of the Second Great Awakening was the key role of women in religion. The majority of new church members are women. In fact, women are going to play an important role in the Second Great Awakening, but also in the household, because their role was of bringing the family back into religious worship.
In fact, many women, inspired by their involvement in the Second Great Awakening, are going to be involved in other reform efforts. One particular group you should be aware of are the Mormons, and their founder is a guy by the name of Joseph Smith. He creates the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly referred to as the Mormons. He gets this Book of Revelations, and he ends up traveling the country, eventually ending up in Illinois.
As a result of his views, an angry mob kills him in 1844, and Joseph Smith is replaced by a new leader of the Mormon people. Brigham Young. And he ends up leading the Mormon followers to the area of what is today Utah in 1846-1847 on this great Mormon trek. And what happens is they develop this separate community, New Zion, where they're going to be very prosperous. On the frontier they are cooperative.
Everyone's working together with the same mission. And the settlement is going to grow over time by the birth rate but also lots of Mormons are going to come from abroad because Mormon missionaries are going to be spreading across the globe looking for new members. An important thing to keep in mind with regard to the Mormons is the admission of Utah as a state will be delayed until 1896 because one of the things practiced by the Mormon community was polygamy having multiple wives which was a controversial thing for the US government.
This period, an important concept to keep in mind, is this age of reform. Partly inspired by religious motives, but also sometimes secular, having nothing to do with religion. One interesting person you should be aware of is Dorothea Dix.
She is going to work just tirelessly to reform mental health treatment. When she was investigating this issue, she saw that many people were put in prison with mental health issues, with criminals, and the treatment of the mentally ill was... She travels the country and her efforts lead to the growth of professional treatment for the mentally ill.
Other reforms is education reform. Tax-supported schools were rare in the early years of the republic. Education schooling was the privilege of the elite if anybody had access to it.
And so education was really bad. And there are some benefits that people begin to think about for public education of the population. One is you want to instill Republican values.
You want people to be good citizens and, you know, be knowledgeable. You also want to instill values such as discipline and hard work. You want people to have basic reading skills so that they can work in the factories and be able to operate the machinery. And, of course, with all these immigrants coming over, some people who advocated public education, you know, you want to Americanize these immigrants, these Irish and these German immigrants that are coming to America during this time. Key figure in this movement is Horace Mann.
He becomes the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. He starts putting all sorts of reforms forward, such as longer school terms, compulsory attendance, you have to go to school, an expanded curriculum, and of course, more schools. Sorry kids, Horace Mann is partly to blame.
This is going to be a northern reform movement more than any others. The South isn't too keen on adopting these education reforms. there's not a real need in a plantation-based economy. Of course, also keep in mind that this public schooling is going to be largely in the north.
In fact, in the south, it was illegal to teach slaves to read or write. The famous story of Douglas learning to read and write with his master's disproval. Another reform movement you should be aware of is the temperance movement. There were huge drinking problems in the country. Drinking excessively was all too common.
It was lonely on the frontier out on the farm and people drank excessively. And there's a lot of different motives as to why you want people to drink less. One, the factory system, especially in the north, you need an efficient, controlled labor source. You don't want people drunk moving slow because they're hungover. Family life is always a concern.
You don't want drunk husbands beating their wives and children. And for some, once again, this issue of immigration, many saw... the Irish and the German immigrants coming from cultures where drinking was way too common and some Americans wanted to slow this down.
Well, the American Temperance Society is created in 1826. At first, they kind of urged their members to take a drinking or a non-drinking pledge to abstain from drinking. Here you have a man pledging to his family that he will stop drinking. Over time, the American Temperance Society, very religious, a lot of evangelical Christians join it, but also secular people. They're going to move from creating propaganda to spread their dry message to actually...
trying to get people to stop drinking legally. So there's a move from temperance, hey stop drinking, to actual trying to get laws passed. And you're going to see a law passed in Maine in 1851, which prohibits the manufacture and sale of liquor. And of course, the big one will be nationwide when the 18th Amendment is adopted right at the start of the 1920s, banning liquor in America.
More on that another time. The women's movement is going to develop during this time. Women are going to resist their substandard position in society. Women were treated like second-class citizens. You know, this period, this age of the common man, democratization, where the property requirements were going away, did not apply to women.
This really, truly did mean the age of the common man. Women were excluded. No right to vote. They forfeited their property to their husbands, and so on. And what you get is this belief in the cult of the domesticity, this idea that the home was a special place for women where they would take care of their family and that is kind of their realm.
There was this idea of republican motherhood where mothers would raise their children to be good citizens, but that was very limiting for many women. And as a result, you do get some women starting to resist, women reformers. There are... partly inspired by the Second Great Awakening.
They're taking a more public role within the church, but others are going to demand, you know, rights for women. Some women are going to be very involved in the temperance movement, the anti-drinking movement, and some women are going to be very involved in the abolitionist movement against slavery. Two important women you should know about, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Both are going to be advocating for the right of women to vote. suffrage.
In fact, in 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention takes place in New York. Women meet. It is the first national meeting amongst women. Stanton reads the Declaration of Sentiments and very closely modeled after the Declaration, it says all men and women are created equal. In fact, not only do they have a list of resolutions, they demand the right to vote for women, and it is seen as the beginning of the modern women's rights movement.
However, over time, the women's rights movement in the 19th century, Antebellum Americum, is going to be overshadowed by the abolitionist movement, and women will have to wait for the right to vote until the 19th Amendment happens. Another important group, the Transcendentalists, Transcendentalism, this idea that truth transcends the senses. It's not just found by observation alone.
Every person possesses an inner light. that can illuminate the highest truth. And you get these thinkers and these these writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson who stressed self-reliance, self-improvement, and freedom.
In fact, Emerson is in 1837 going to deliver the American Scholar speech at Harvard University where he's going to challenge Americans to make their own art and culture. Don't just copy Europe. The guy you see with the really kinda crazy eyes is Henry David Thoreau. He is going to be another transcendentalist.
He is going to write on the duty of civil disobedience, where he refuses to pay his taxes during the Mexican-American War because he feels it is an unjust war, and his ideas are going to inspire people such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King later on in the 20th century. Another kind of transcendentalist book is the book Walden, where Thoreau lives out in nature for two years, kind of discovering... his inner self. And with this you're going to see the rise of utopian communities during this time period.
Various movements to move away from conventional society and create a utopian community. The Mormons are an example of a religious communal effort. They moved away from traditional society partly because traditional society was so hostile to them. You get Brook Farm which was a communal transcendentalist experiment in Massachusetts. It was secular.
non-religious, it was humanistic, the Transcendentalist Society of Brook Farm and then you get another one like New Harmony where they create a socialist type community that would be the answer to the problems presented by industrialization, this kind of inequality that the Industrial Revolution was creating, New Harmony was meant to address that. Many of these utopian communities would fail but many many spring up across the country. Alright, that's going to do it for today. Thanks for watching.
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