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| 261843668 | Seneca Falls | Unflinching feminists met at his location in New York in a memorable Woman's Rights Convention in 1848. The defiant Stanton read a "Declaration of Sentiments," which in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence declared that "all men and women are created equal." | |
| 261843669 | Dorothea Dix | A formidable New England teacher-author, she was a physically frail woman afflicted with persistent lung trouble who possessed infinite compassion and willpower. She traveled some 60,000 miles in eight years and assembled her damning reports on insanity and asylums from firsthand observations. | |
| 261843670 | Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell | A pioneer in a previously forbidden profession for women, she was the first female graduate of a medical college. | |
| 261843671 | *Frederick Douglass | This gifted and eloquent former slave was an abolitionist and self-educated orator of rare power. He was mobbed several times and beaten by northern rowdies. | |
| 261843672 | Transcendentalism | The transcendentalists rejected the prevailing theory, derived from John Locke, that all knowledge comes to the mind from the senses. Truth, rather, "transcends" the sense: it cannot be found by observation alone. Every person possesses an inner light that can illuminate the highest truth and put him or her in direct touch with God, or the "Oversoul." | |
| 261843673 | James Fenimore Cooper | This man was the first american novelist to gain world fame and to make New World themes respectable. | |
| 261843674 | Elizabeth Cady Stanton | A mother of seven, she had insisted on leaving "obey" out of her marriage ceremony, and shocked fellow feminists by going so far as to advocate suffrage for women. | |
| 261843675 | *William Lloyd Garrison | A mild-looking reformer of 26, he proclaimed strident tones that under no circumstances would he tolerate the poisonous weed of slavery, but would stamp it out at once, root and branch. | |
| 261843676 | Stephen Foster | Known as the "father of American music", he was the pre-eminent songwriter in the United States of the 19th century. He made a valuable contribution to American folk music by capturing the plaintive spirit of the slaves. His songs — such as "Oh! Susanna", "Camptown Races", "Old Folks at Home" ("Swanee River"), "Hard Times Come Again No More", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Old Black Joe", "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", and "Beautiful Dreamer" — remain popular over 150 years after their composition. | |
| 261843677 | Walt Whitman | Bold, brassy, and swaggering was the open-collared figure of this man. In his famous collection of poems Leaves of Grass, he gave free rein to his gushing genius with what he called a "barbaric yawp." Highly romantic, emotional, and unconventional, he dispensed with titles, stanzas, rhymes, and at times even regular meter. | |
| 261843678 | Prof. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | A professor, this man taught modern languages at Harvard College, and was one of the most popular poets ever produced in America. Handsome and urbane, he lived a generally serene life, except for the tragic deaths of his two wives, the second of whom perished before his eyes when her dress caught on fire. | |
| 261843679 | American Temperance Society | This society was formed at Boston in 1826. Within a few years, about 1000 local groups sprang into existence. They implored drinkers to sign the temperance pledge and organized children's clubs, known as the "Cold Water Army." | |
| 261843680 | Horace Mann | A brilliant and idealistic graduate of Brown University, he campaigned effectively for more and better schoolhouses, longer school terms, higher pay for teachers, and an expanded curriculum. | |
| 261843681 | Noah Webster | A Yale-educated Yankee, he was known as the "Schoolmaster of the Republic." His "reading lessons," used by millions of children in the 19th century, were partly designed to promote patriotism. He devoted 20 years to his famous dictionary, published in 1828, which helped to standardize the American language. | |
| 261843682 | Mormons | Brigham Young led his oppressed Mormons to Salt Lake City, Utah. Semiarid Utah grew remarkably, and this religious group "made the desert bloom like a new Eden." | |
| 261843683 | Henry David Thoreau | This man was Ralph Waldo Emerson's close associate - a poet, a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a nonconformist. Condemning a government that supported slavery, he refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax and was jailed for a night. | |
| 261843684 | Second Great Awakening | A key feature of the Second Great Awakening was the feminization of religion, in terms of both church membership and theology. Middle-class women were the first and most fervent enthusiasts of religious revivalism. | |
| 261843685 | John J. Audubon | Lovers of American bird lore owed much to this French-descended naturalist, who painted wildfowl in their natural habitat. His magnificently illustrated Birds of America attained considerable popularity. The Audubon Society for the protection of birds was named after him. | |
| 261843686 | Unitarianism | This religious group held that God existed in only one person, and not in the orthodox Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit). They stressed the essential goodness of human nature rather than its vileness, and they pictured God as a loving Father, instead of a stern Creator. | |
| 261843687 | Brigham Young | Under this Mormon's rigidly disciplined management, the community of Salt Lake City became a prosperous frontier theocracy and a cooperative commonwealth. | |
| 261843688 | Oneida Community | This radical experiment was founded in New York in 1848. It practiced free love birth control, and the selection of parents to produce superior offspring. This enterprise flourished for over 30 years, on account of its superior steel traps and cutlery. | |
| 261843689 | Charles Grandison Finney | The greatest of the revival preachers, he abandoned his lawyer training to become an evangelist after a deeply moving conversion experience. He led massive revivals in Rochester and New York City in 1830 and 1831. He devised the "anxious bench." | |
| 261843690 | Joseph Smith | He reported that he had received some golden plates from an angel. When deciphered, this constituted the Book of Mormon. | |
| 261843691 | Susan B. Anthony | Quaker-reared, she was a militant lecturer for women's rights, fearlessly exposing herself to rotten garbage and vulgar epithets. She became such a conspicuous advocate of female rights that progressive women everywhere were called "Suzy Bs." | |
| 261843692 | Robert Owen | A wealthy and idealistic Scottish textile manufacturer, he founded a communal society of about 1000 people at New Harmony, Indiana. | |
| 261843693 | New Harmony | Robert Owen founded a society here in 1825. Little harmony prevailed in the colony, which, in addition to hard-working visionaries, attracted a sprinkling or radicals, work-shy theorists, and outright scoundrels. The colony sank "in a morass of contradiction and confusion." | |
| 261843694 | Brook Farm | This location in Massachusetts comprised of 200 acres of grudging soil and was started in 1841 with the cooperation of about 20 intellectuals committed to the philosophy of transcendentalism. In 1846, they lost by fire a large new communal building shortly before its completion. The experiment inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel The Blithesdale Romance. | |
| 261843695 | William H. McGuffey | An Ohioan, he was a teacher-preacher of rare power. His grade-school readers, first published in the 1830s, sold 122 million copies in the following decades. McGuffey's Readers hammered home lasting lessons in morality, patriotism, and idealism. |
