Unit 9

During Unit 9

In Reform Movements, we will learn about significant individuals during the period.

We will analyze why this period was labeled “The Second Great Awakening" because it brought about a social reform to make America a “heaven on earth”.

 
We will describe the impact each reform movement had on American society. 

We will get to know how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott decided a Women's Rights convention was needed and chose their hometown of Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. 

Many new ideas emerged such as Susan B. Anthony's struggle for  Women's suffrage and women's role in the workforce. Many women who campaigned a need for women's rights were also abolitionists to slavery.

Sojourner Truth traveled the North and recited her famous “Ain't I a Woman speech”. William Lloyd Garrison, a white abolitionist, published an antislavery newspaper titled “The Liberator''. 

Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and abolitionist, also published a newspaper titled “The North Star”. 

At this time The Underground Railroad flourished bringing escaped slaves from the South to freedom in the free North with the help of a religious group who opposed slavery called Quakers. 

The most famous conductor or leader on The Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman who brought hundreds to freedom. 

The author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom's Cabin” became a bestselling novel on the horrors of slavery and was instrumental to the growing of the abolitionist movement.

Dorothea Dix championed reform for prisons and insane asylums after visits and seeing inhumane treatment firsthand. 

Women tired of their husbands drunkenness and abuse started the Temperance Movement to stop the sale of alcohol.

How Horace Mann in Massachusetts started the public school education system and called it the great equalizer. 

The Transcendentalist movement was started for individuals to find their personal relation to nature. 

The Hudson River School for artists started the trend of landscapes in art focusing on rivers and mountains and an appreciation of nature. 

These movements help change America combining religious, social and new political ideals for the growing nation.