Culture and reform in the early nineteenth century

At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass both signed the Declaration of Sentiments, demonstrating that

• members of the women's rights movement and the abolition movement worked together.

• sectional allegiances were gradually becoming more important than party allegiances.

• despite their progressive stances on other issues, Stanton and Douglass shared a mutual distrust of Native Americans.

What did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (also known as the Mormons) have in common with other American religious movements of the early nineteenth century?

• It was founded in the “Burned-Over” District of western New York

• It experimented with alternate relationships between the men and women rather than traditional marriage

• It died out before the Civil War

Which of the following was a direct consequence of the Second Great Awakening?

• Increasing interest in Catholicism in the United States

• Reform movements, including temperance and abolition

• Growing support for the ideology of Manifest Destiny

Answer explanation

As many people established more personal relationships to God, they wanted to combat the immorality evident within alcoholism (through the temperance movement) and slavery (through the abolition movement).

Identify the origin of the following passage:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.”

• The Declaration of Independence, signed at the Second Continental Congress in 1776

• The Declaration of the Rights of Man, signed by the National Assembly of France in 1789

• The Declaration of Sentiments, signed at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848

Answer explanation

This document became the basis for the early women’s movement and the fight for suffrage.

What early nineteenth-century trend do the Shakers best exemplify?

• The expansion of new transportation technology due to the Market Revolution

• The extension of voting rights to new groups thanks to Jacksonian Democracy

• The explosion in new religious movements due to the Second Great Awakening

Answer explanation

The Shakers believed that separating the sexes and practicing celibacy would purify their deeply religious society.

If you were concerned about the effect of alcoholism on individuals and families, which nineteenth century reform movement would you be most likely to join?

• The temperance movement

• The abolition movement

• The sanatorium movement

Answer explanation

The temperance movement aimed to curb alcohol consumption due to alcoholism’s detrimental effect on early nineteenth-century families.

Nineteenth-century figures such as Horace Mann, Dorothea Dix, and William Lloyd Garrison demonstrate

• the shift toward government-sponsored reform movements in the early republic.

• that all social reformers belonged to the Democratic Party.

• the broad-ranging nature of social reform movements in the early republic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are best known as members of the

• temperance movement.

• Transcendentalist movement.

• abolitionist movement.

Why was the region surrounding Rochester, New York nicknamed the “Burned-Over District” in the first half of the nineteenth century?

• During the Second Great Awakening, there were so many revivals there that it seemed as though the area had been burned over with religious fervor

• As white settlers moved farther west into the frontier, conflict with Native Americans kept the region in near-constant warfare

• A deadly forest fire broke out near Lake Erie in 1825, after which residents constructed the Erie Canal on the cleared land

Answer explanation

The term was coined by Charles Grandison Finney, a famous Presbyterian minister and leader of the Second Great Awakening.

Which of the following social developments was most directly responsible for the creation of the early nineteenth century “cult of domesticity"?

• The gradual shift from a more urban society to a more rural society, in which women were frequently isolated in the home many miles from other families

• The shift toward wage labor through the Market Revolution, which led to “separate spheres” of work outside the home for men and work inside the home for women

• The growing embrace of voting rights for women in western states like Wyoming and Montana

Answer explanation

Women were expected to cook, clean, and raise children, while men went into the public workforce to earn wages.