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Chapter 16 - The Ferment of Reform and Culture

Louis Agassiz

Louis Agassiz was a professor at Harvard College. He was a student of biology who insisted on original research. He hated the overemphasis on memory work. Agassiz was one of the most influential American scientists in the nineteenth century.

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Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an author born in New York in 1819. He was uneducated and an orphan. Melville served eighteen months as a whaler. These adventuresome years served as a major part in his writing. Melville wrote Moby Dick in 1851 which was much less popular than his tales of the South seas. Herman Melville died in 1891.

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Henry David Thoreau

He was a poet, a mystic, a transcendentalist, a nonconformist, and a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson who lived from 1817-1862. He condemned government for supporting slavery and was jailed when he refused to pay his Mass. poll tax. He is well known for his novel about the two years of simple living he spent on the edge of Walden Pond called "Walden" , Or Life in the Woods. This novel furthered many idealistic thoughts. He was a great transcendentalist writer who not only wrote many great things, but who also encouraged, by his writings, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

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Robert Owen

Robert Owen was a wealthy and idealistic Scottish textile manufacturer. He sought to better the human race and set up a communal society in 1825. There were about a thousand persons at New Harmony, Indiana. The enterprise was not a success.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

He wrote the Scarlet Letter in 1850. This was his masterpiece. He also wrote The Marble Faun. Many of his works had early American themes. The Scarlet Letter is about a woman who commits adultery in a Puritan village. Hawthorn's upbringing was heavily influenced by his puritan ancestors.

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Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony was a lecturer for women's rights. She was a Quaker. Many conventions were held for the rights of women in the 1840s. Susan B. Anthony was a strong woman who believed that men and women were equal. She fought for her rights even though people objected. Her followers were called Suzy B's.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe lived from 1809-1849 and was cursed with hunger, cold, poverty, and debt. He was orphaned as a child and when he married his fourteen year old wife, she died of tuberculosis. He wrote books that deal with the ghostly and ghastly, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher." (pg. 345)

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William Cullen Bryant

Bryant was born in Cummington, Mass. on Nov. 3, 1794. He was a journalist, literary critic, public speaker, and the first significant poet in 19th century American Literature. He supported Andrew Jackson and the Democrats, defended the right of workers to strike, spoke out against slavery, proposed a central park for the city, helped to organize the Republican party, and fought the Tweed ring.

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a member of the women's right's movement in 1840. She was a mother of seven, and she shocked other feminists by advocating suffrage for women at the first Women's Right's Convention in Seneca, New York 1848. Stanton read a "Declaration of Sentiments" which declared "all men and women are created equal."

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