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Learn
About Pre-Civil
War Reform
During the decades preceding the Civil
War, reformers launched unprecedented campaigns to educate the deaf and
the blind, to rehabilitate cure the mentally ill, extend equal rights
to women, and abolish slavery. Inspired by the Declaration of Independence,
the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, and liberal and evangelical religious
principles, educational reformers created a system of free public education;
prison reformers constructed specialized institutions to rehabilitate
criminals, temperance reformers sought to end the drinking of hard liquor;
and utopian socialists established ideal communities to serve as models
for a better world. Our modern systems of free public schools, prisons,
and hospitals for the infirm and the mentally ill are products of this
first age of American reform.
The
decades before the Civil War saw the birth of the American reform tradition.
America’s first age of reform was also an era of extraordinary intellectual
and artistic ferment.The history of the first American reform movements
and the emergence of a distinctive American culture.
“How is it with
the slave?”
William Lloyd Garrison, 1830
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/documents/documents_p2.cfm?doc=73
To
learn more
Maps:
Places
Where Women Made History
http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/pwwmh/main1.htm
Images:
To
learn more
Timelines:
Click
here for timeline.
Fact sheets and lesson plans:
Fact sheetmaybe
an s2:
Religion
and Social Reform
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/us15.cfm
Recommended
lesson plan:
The
Age of Reform
http://history.osu.edu/projects/hti/
Lessons/Age%20of%20Reform.htm
Fact checks:
Test
your knowledge about Pre-Civil War reform.
Recommended readings:
Steven
Mintz, Moralists & Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers
An overview and interpretation of the major reforms of the era, including
abolition, temperance and women's rights.
 Recommended
film{maybe an s} :
Amistad
Steven Spielberg’s
flawed recreation of the 1839 incident in which kidnapped Africans overcame
their captors and were subsequently put on trial in the United States for piracy.
The film downplays the extent of racism in the North and distorts the role of
religion in motivating antislavery.
Comprehensive reviews
of this movie
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/movie-1081365/
Learn
more:
learn
more film
 Recommended
Web site:
Religion
and the Founding of the American Republic
http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel07.html
A succinct history of the role of religion in stimulating organized
benevolence.
Click
for more Web sites.
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