U.S. History

Chapter 15: New Movements in America

Section 1: America’s Spiritual Awakening

The Second Great Awakening

•Second Great Awakening: movement of Christian renewal that began in the 1790s and became widespread in the U.S. by the 1830s

The Second Great Awakening

• Charles Grandison Finney: one of the most important leaders of the Second Great Awakening

Charles Grandison Finney

The Second Great Awakening

• Finney’s message:

– Individuals responsible for salvation

– Sin was avoidable

– Demonstrate faith by good deeds

The Second Great Awakening

•Church membership increased

•Women & African Americans drawn to movement

Transcendentalism & Utopian Communities

•Transcendentalism—the idea that people can rise above the material things in life

Transcendentalism & Utopian Communities

• Transcendentalists

– Important Figures

•Ralph Waldo Emerson•Margaret Fuller•Henry David Thoreau

– Encouraged people to look within for guidance & to live simply

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Transcendentalism & Utopian Communities

•Utopian Communities—place where people worked to establish a perfect society

Transcendentalism & Utopian Communities

•Most Transcendentalist communities were failures:

–Brooke Farm

–Community founded for Shakers by Ann Lee

The American Romantics

•Artists

–Focused on the American landscape

–Thomas Cole

The American Romantics

Nathaniel HawthorneThe Scarlet Letter

Herman MelvilleMoby-Dick

Edgar Allen PoeThe Raven

The American Romantics

•Other noted poets

–Emily Dickinson–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow–John Greenleaf Whittier–Walt Whitman