US History › Section G · Reform and a decade of crisis › Topic G.1
Religious revival and individualism
Between about 1800 and 1850, a wave of Protestant revivals and a small circle of New England thinkers both taught Americans that the individual could change their own life. That belief powered almost every reform movement of the age.
In this topic
- A fast-changing country looks inward
- The Second Great Awakening
- Free will, democracy and the millennium
- Charles Finney and the burned-over district
- Faith, slavery and Black churches
- From revival to reform
- Worked example: why revivals blazed in western New York
- Transcendentalism
- Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman and the critics
- Worked example: reading Emerson as a source
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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