PRE-CIVIL WAR SOCIETY
Questions/Thinking Points

Pre-Civil War Culture

1.  How did early Americans treat culture?

2.  Who were the Transcendentalists and what did they believe?
3.  Know the writers of the early nineteenth century as well as what they wrote.  (See terms.)
4.  What was the biggest obstacle to the realization visual arts in the early republic?
5.  How did American artists overcome hostility towards the visual arts?
6.  What factors contributed to the emergence of a "popular culture" in early America?
7.  What were the penny newspapers and what did they print?
8.  What kind of stories were published in the dime novels?
9.  What were some of the themes written about in the domestic novel?
10.  What were some of the characteristics of American humorists and tellers of "tall tales"?
11.  What were some of the characteristics of early American theater?
12.  Describe the minstrel show and its significance as an early American art form.

Terms
Washington Irving
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
James Fenimore Cooper
Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Brook Farm
Edgar Allen Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
Jonathan Singleton Copley
Charles Wilson Peale
Gilbert Stuart
John Trumbukk
Hudson River School
Thomas Cole
Albert Bierstadt
Frederick Church
penny newspapers
Erastus Beadle
dime novel
Susan Warner
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Francis Parkman
George Lippard
Ned Buntline
domestic novels
Davy Crockett
melodrama
Astor Place Riot
lyceum movement
minstrel show
Stephen C. Foster


Religion in the Early Republic

1.  How did American views of religion change between the Revolutionary era and the years of the early republic?
2.  Describe the origins and signifiance of the revival movement.  What explains the rapid rise of this movement?
3.  How did the revivals reflect and further social change?
4.  What lasting impression did the revivals make on American culture?
5.  What element did evangelical Protestant sects have in common?
6.  Compare and contrast the First and Second Great Awakenings.
7.  Describe the conversion experience and its importance in shaping early American culture.
8.  How were the revivals of the Second Great Awkening "orchestrated"?  What were some common features?
9.  What was the effect of revivalism on Calvinist beliefs?
10.  How did the participants in the Second Great Awakening feel about their relationship to social change and their place in history?
11.  How and why did attitudes towards proseletyzing among slaves change in this era?
12.  How did slaves produce a "hybrid" form of Christainity and how did it differ from the religion of slave owners?
13.  Who were the Mormons?  Why did Mormonism spread so quickly?
14.  What kind of community structure did the Mormons develop?
15.  Why were the Mormons persecuted?
16.  Why were Catholics persecuted in early America? 
17.  What role did immigration play in the increasing hostility towards Catholics?  Likewise, how the revival movement contribute to this hostility?
18.  How did Catholics respond to popular hostility towards them?
19.  What were some of the challenges faced by Jews in early American society?
20.  What were some of the characteritics of Reform Judaism in early America?
21.  Desribe the emergence of separate black churches in early America.

Terms
William Ellery Channing
Unitarianism
Second Great Awakening
revivals
camp meetings
evangelical
Charles Grandison Finney
conversion experience
predestination
universal salvation

Alexander Campbell
Disciples of Christ
spirituals
Joseph Smith, Jr.
Mormonism
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
parochial schools
Reformed Judaism
Richard Allen
African Methodist Episcopal Church

Pre-Civil War Reform

1.  What factors gave rise to the reform impulse in pre-Civil War America?
2.  Why did moral reformers concentrate so heavily on temperance?
3.  What was the link between reform and anti-slavery efforts?
4.  Why did reform efforts shift from colonization to abolition?
5.  On what grounds did the abolitionists attack slavery?
6.  What were some of the issues that divided the antislavery movement?
7.  What were some of the early political efforts produced by the abolitionist movement?
8.  What role did African Americans play in the abolitionist movement?
9.  Desribe the beliefs and communities of the Shakers.
10.  Describe the socialism experimental communities of Robert Owen and John H. Noyes.  What ideas drove them?  Why did they succeed or fail?

Terms
moral reform
Magdalene societies
The New York Moral Reform Society
temperence
American Society for the Promotion of Temperance
Washingtonian movement
prohibition
American Colonization Society
Liberia
David Walker
William Lloyd Garrison
The Liberator
American Anti-Slavery Society
Arthur and Lewis Tappan
The Liberty party
Free Soil party
New England Non-Resistance Society

William Wells Brown
Henry Bibb
Harriet Tubman
undergwound railroad
Frederick Douglass
Martin Delaney
utopian socialism
Shakers
Robert Owen
New Harmony
Charles Fourier
phalanx
Frances "Fanny" Wright
John Humphrey Noyes
Oneida
complex marriage

This page last updated June 15, 2007
© Kahne Parsons, 2007-08