payment page
Second Great Awakening
The democratization of the nation’s politics came along with a similar democratization of religion. What would become the Second Great Awakening was a new religious movement during the early 1800s that focused on the importance of the individual, rejected previous ideas of a vengeful Christian God, and worked at offering the possibility of salvation to all. This religious revival period was similar to the First Great Awakening from the 1740s–1770s, calling people to return to focus on their religious faith. Church membership rapidly increased by the tens of thousands, with new, more inclusive denominations like the Baptists and Methodists seeing major growth. Frontier revivals brought church gatherings to those living along the frontiers.
Reform Movements
Reformers who were emboldened by the era’s spirit of equality and facilitated by the growth of communication technology sought to bring American society into harmony with the spiritual ideas of the Second Great Awakening. Horace Mann began movements to reform education by promoting free public schools for children in Massachusetts that quickly spread to other states. Women such as Dorothea Dix fought for the rights of prisoners and the mentally ill by pushing for their scientific and humane treatment. New types of prisons and asylums (institutions that cared for the mentally ill) sought to reform and rehabilitate rather than simply punish and separate. Additionally, the modern women’s rights movement began with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, proclaiming a “Declaration of Sentiments” based on the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Sentiments argued that the “inalienable rights” outlined in the original Declaration of Independence belonged to both women and men.
New American Culture
Not content to merely mimic European art and literature, Americans imbued with the new sense of a uniquely American identity also influenced arts, literature, and philosophy. American thinkers were still influenced by the 19th-century Romantic ideas that challenged the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason with a greater focus on emotion, passion, and the unknown. Along the same lines, the American school of thought known as Transcendentalism stressed the importance of the individual, the willingness to go against the dominant opinions of society, and, above all, thinking for oneself. Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson sought to “commune” with nature or expand on the importance of “self-reliance.” In painting, the Hudson River School broke from European models by focusing on America’s natural beauty.
