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| Philosophical/religious group that relied on reason rather than revelation and on empirical fact rather than the Bible, rejecting original sin and Christ's divinity. | ||
| Religious movement that began in England at the end of the eighteenth century, insisting that God was only one person and denying the deity of Jesus, embraced by leading philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. | ||
| Wave of religious revivals around 1800 that encouraged a culture of evangelicalism responsible for an upswing in prison reform, the temperance cause, the feminist movement, and abolition. | ||
| One of the best known traveling Methodist preachers, he wandered from Tennessee to Illinois for fifty years, calling for repentance and converting thousands. Known for beating up rowdies at his sermons. | ||
| Greatest of the revival preachers, he was trained as a lawyer before becoming an evangelist. Led revivals in Rochester and New York City in 1830 and 1831. He invented the "anxious bench", where sinners were to sit in full view of the congregation. Served as president of Oberlin College in Ohio. | ||
| Founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, he claimed to have received his doctrine on golden plates from an angel. | ||
| Drilled a militia to protect their controversial polygamist sect, they moved west under Young's leadership and settled in Utah in 1848, which would not achieve statehood for another 48 years due to their controversial presence. | ||
| Backwoods preacher who had only eleven days of formal schooling, but supplied the strict administration and visionary leadership necessary to lead the Mormons away from persecution. | ||
| Graduate of Brown University who became secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and campaigned for school reforms, among which were better schoolhouses, longer terms, higher pay for educators, and expanded curriculum. | ||
| Yale graduate from Connecticut known as the "Schoolmaster of the Republic", who created standard reading lessons and a dictionary in 1828 that helped to standardize the American language. | ||
| Ohio teacher and preacher who published a series of grade-school readers in the 1830s, selling 122 million copies. | ||
| Worked to create respectable women's secondary schools, eventually founding the Troy Female Seminary in 1821. | ||
| Established Mount Holyoke Seminary for women in South Hadley, Massachusetts in 1837. | ||
| Organizations that numbered about three thousand in 1835, providing platforms for lecturers in areas such as science, literature, and philosophy. | ||
| Teacher and author from New England who traveled over sixty thousand miles in eight years, collecting reports on the treatment of the insane and conditions in asylums, which she used in an 1843 petition to the Massachusetts legislature, gaining improved treatment and conditions for the mentally ill. | ||
| Formed in 1828 under the leadership of men such as William Ladd, crusading for harmony and nonviolent co-existence with one's neighbors in the pre-Civil War years. | ||
| Formed in Boston in 1826, about a thousand local groups forming within a few years, imploring drinkers to swear off the habit and organizing children's clubs against alcoholism. | ||
| Called "the law of Heaven Americanized", it prohibited the manufacture and sale of liquor. | ||
| Prominent figure in the women's rights movement, she was a Quaker who joined the movement when she and her fellow women delegates to the London antislavery convention of 1840 were not recognized. | ||
| Mother of seven who insisted on leaving the word "obey" out of his marriage vows, and was the first to advocate suffrage for women. | ||
| Quaker-raised lecturer for women's rights and one of the most conspicuous leaders of the movement, so much so that progressive women everywhere came to be nicknamed after her. | ||
| Convention for women's rights in 1848, at which Stanton read a "Declaration of Sentiments", launching the modern women's rights movement and demanding female suffrage. | ||
| Scottish textile manufacturer who founded a community of about a thousand people in 1825 at New Harmony, Indiana, which failed to produced communitarian harmony and quickly collapsed. | ||
| Two hundred acre community in Massachusetts founded in 1841 by a group of twenty transcendentalists, who prospered until the community collapsed in debt after a large building went down in a fire. | ||
| Radical community founded in New York in 1848, practicing free love, birth control and eugenic selection of parents. It lasted for more than thirty years due to the prosperous silver and steel industry. | ||
| Pioneering oceanographer in the mid-19th century whose writings on ocean winds and currents promoted safety, speed, and economy. | ||
| Pioneer chemist and geologist who wrote and taught at Yale for more than half a century. | ||
| French-Swiss immigrant who taught biology for about 25 years at Harvard, emphasizing the importance of original research and deploring memory work. | ||
| Professor at Harvard and pioneering American botanist, he published over 350 books, monographs and papers. | ||
| French-American naturalist who was known for his paintings of wild birds in their natural surroundings, best known for his work Birds of America. | ||
| Creator of a fad diet that consisted entirely of whole-wheat bread and crackers. | ||
| Rhode Island painter who became a renowned artist in Britain, known for his idealized portraits of Washington. | ||
| Maryland-born painter who painted about sixty portraits of Washington, who actually sat for fourteen of them. | ||
| American painter who had fought in the Revolutionary War and made it his practice to recreate scenes of the war. | ||
| Art school that specialized in romantic paintings of local landscapes. | ||
| Crude ancestor of photography, pioneered in 1839 by a Frenchman, after whom it was named. | ||
| Group of prestigious American-born writers that vaulted American literature into the realm of international prestige. | ||
| New Yorker who was the first to win international claim as a writer, he combined quiet charm and humor in a pleasing style that made his works Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow worldwide favorites that helped to translate American culture to Europe and vice versa. | ||
| The first American novelist to gain worldwide fame, he decided that he could write better than what he viewed as "insipid" English novelists, he wrote such famed works as The Spy, Leatherstocking Tales, and The Last of the Mohicans. | ||
| Massachusetts-born member of the Knickerbocker Group, he wrote Thanatopsis at age sixteen, which was one of the first high-quality poems written in America. He made his living by editing the New York Evening Post, setting a journalistic standard. | ||
| A liberalization of Puritan theology, it held the belief that each person possessed an inner ability to illuminate the highest truth, therefore, understanding came from within, and not from any external authority. | ||
| Transcendentalist Bostonian who was trained as a Unitarian minister before rejecting the pulpit for the life of a writer, becoming an influential lyceum lecturer and known for his Harvard address "The American Scholar". He was also known for his philosophy and outspoken criticism of slavery. | ||
| Close friend of Emerson, he is best known for his prose work "Walden", as well as his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience". His writings influenced peacemakers such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. | ||
| Brooklyn poet who wrote the collection Leaves of Grass, known for his unconventional style and frank dealings with topics such as human sexuality. | ||
| Professor of modern languages at Harvard, he was one of the most popular American poets ever, writing for the upper classes with a style that also appealed to the less cultured. Blended European and American traditions, he is honored with a bust in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. | ||
| Quaker who was the unofficial poet laureate of the antislavery movement, influential in his writings against inhumanity, injustice, and intolerance. | ||
| Succeeded Longfellow at Harvard, he was a poet who was also known for his essays and literary criticism, as well as the satirist of the Biglow Papers. | ||
| Professor of anatomy at Harvard, he regarded Boston as "the hub of the universe" and was also known for his poetry, essays, novels, and witticisms. | ||
| Influential American female author who grew up under the influence of Emerson and Thoreau. She is best known for her novel Little Women. | ||
| Reclusive female poet of Amherst, Massachusetts, whose entire body of two thousand poems were published only posthumously. | ||
| Southern writer of eighty-two novels, known as the Cooper of the South, dealing with themes of the southern frontier and the South during the American Revolution. | ||
| Virginian poet and writer of short stories, known for his mastery of horror, as well as his precarious mental and physical health. | ||
| Puritan author who grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, best known for his novels The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun. | ||
| New Yorker who served eighteen months on a whaling ship, using the experience for his epic masterpiece Moby-Dick, totally ignored during his lifetime. | ||
| Secretary of the Navy, he founded the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845, known as the Father of American History for his six-volume history of the United States. | ||
| American historian who, with only one eye, wrote accounts of the conquests of Mexico and Peru. | ||
| American historian with terrible vision, he chronicled in darkness the conflict between France and Britain for North America. |
