New Movements in America

Chapter 13

Immigrants• Push Factors

– Starvation– Poverty– No political freedom

• Pull Factors– Jobs– Freedom & equality– More land

• Irish immigrants were poor and settled in cities in the Northeast.– Left Ireland because of potato famine and economic & political

oppression by Britain.

• Many German immigrants became farmers in the Midwest.

Cities• Industrial & Transportation

Revolutions led to the growth of cities.

• Cities offered more entertainment & cultural activities

• Problems:• Crowded & dirty; more diseases• Immigrants & the poor lived in

apartment buildings called tenements.

• Crime & fires

Writers • Transcendentalism• Wrote about living more simply, self-

reliance & following your own beliefs.• Emerson, Fuller & Thoreau• Some formed utopian communities

(perfect societies)• Romanticism• Interest in nature, individual

expression & rejection of established rules.

• Hawthorne, Poe, Dickinson, Longfellow & Whitman.

Reforming Society• Many were inspired by Second

Great Awakening - a religious movement

• Prison reform & hospitals for mentally ill – Dorothea Dix

• Temperance movement – stop drinking alcohol

• Improved public schools – Horace Mann

• Schools for the deaf & blind

Women’s Rights• Many female abolitionists began fighting for

women’s rights.• Wanted more educational & job opportunities.

Some asked for right to vote.• Seneca Falls Convention (1848) – wrote

“Declaration of Sentiments” listing injustices against women.

• Sojourner Truth• Elizabeth Cady Stanton• Lucretia Mott• Lucy Stone• Susan B. Anthony