Transcendentalism owed much of its inspiration to what European movement that rejected the values of the Enlightenment?
answer
Romanticism
→ Transcendentalism owed much of its inspiration to a European movement known as romanticism, in which thinkers such as German philosopher Immanuel Kant and English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected the ordered, rational world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
question
Which statement explains the popularity of minstrelsy after 1830?
answer
The shows united white Americans in their sense of superiority over blacks.
→ Minstrel shows were racist, making fun of African Americans and portraying them as lazy, sensual, and irresponsible. These shows declared the importance of being white and helped spread racist sentiments among immigrants.
question
Abolitionism drew upon which of the following movements?
answer
The Second Great Awakening
→ Like other reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century, abolitionism drew upon the religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening, changing the language of protest and viewing slavery as a sin rather than a violation of republicanism and liberty.
question
Which individual was an early public education reformer active in the nineteenth century?
answer
Horace Mann
→ Mann led the movement to increase elementary schooling and improve the quality of instruction. As secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1837 to 1848, Mann lengthened the school year and established teaching standards in a variety of subjects.
question
Why did Ralph Waldo Emerson encourage listeners and readers to seek transcendence to a higher reality?
answer
He wanted them to experience self-realization.
→ In Emerson's view, individuals could be remade only by discovering their "original relation with Nature" and entering into a mystical union with the "currents of Universal Being," so they could attain individual self-realization.
question
In Springfield, Illinois, in 1842, Abraham Lincoln, then a young politician, praised members of the Washington Temperance Society because they "teach hope to all—despair to none. As applying to their cause, they deny the doctrine of unpardonable sin." What had the Washingtonians done to earn Lincoln's praise?
answer
Provided moral support for recovering alcoholics
→ Lincoln praised the "moral suasion" of the Washington Temperance Society, which turned the antidrinking movement in a new direction by talking publicly about their personal experiences of decline from alcoholism and spiritual recovery due to adoption of temperance.
question
Which of the following is suggested by the illustration that accompanied David Walker's An Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)?
answer
That blacks on earth had a divine right to justice and liberty
→ The document the black figure receives from above shows the words "Liberta" and "Justitia"— Latin for justice and liberty. The illustration aimed to make the point that these things were divine rights for African Americans just as they were for white Americans.
question
Moral reform was primarily a women's movement to attack what problem?
answer
Prostitution
question
Why did Brook Farm fail?
answer
It was unable to become economically self-sufficient.
→ Brook Farm failed economically and was unsustainable. It is true that it attracted mostly intellectuals with few practical skills, but this alone did not lead to failure.
question
Why did young girls in mid-nineteenth century cities turn to prostitution?
answer
Some poor young women did not like the alternative ways of making a living.
→ Young women who worked as domestic servants or in the needle trades in antebellum northern cities not only lived in dire poverty but also suffered sexual exploitation. Many instead turned to prostitution.
question
What was a strategy that evangelical abolitionists used to attack slavery beginning in the 1830s?
answer
Publicizing the evils of slavery
→ Theodore Weld teamed with Angelina and Sarah Grimké to write American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), which used reports from southern newspapers and firsthand testimony to present incriminating evidence of the inherent violence of slavery.
question
What did Godey's Lady's Book teach its readers in the mid-nineteenth century?
answer
How to beautify their homes
→ Godey's Lady's Book and other popular monthly periodicals taught women how to make their homes examples of middle-class efficiency and domesticity.
question
What aspect of transcendentalism is seen in Henry David Thoreau's statement, "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer"?
answer
Individualism
→ Beginning from this premise, Thoreau advocated a thoroughgoing individuality—urging readers to avoid unthinking conformity to social norms and peacefully to resist unjust laws.
question
What practice did the Shakers adopt as a result of their belief that God was both male and female?
answer
Eliminating gender distinctions
→ The Shakers' belief that God represented both the male and female in one body led them to eliminate gender distinctions in such things as community governance.
question
Why did the Virginia assembly reject a bill providing for the gradual emancipation and colonization abroad of African Americans in 1831?
answer
Nat Turner's Rebellion had raised the fear of black violence.
→ Virginians were deeply shaken by Turner's Rebellion and decisively turned away from the prospect of gradually ending slavery. Along with many other southern states, Virginia toughened its slave codes instead.
question
Why did Dorothea Dix lobby the Massachusetts legislature for an enlargement of the state hospital for mental patients?
answer
Dix objected to the fact that mentally ill women were jailed alongside men.
→ Dix had discovered that insane women were jailed alongside male criminals, so she persuaded Massachusetts lawmakers to enlarge the state hospital to house indigent mental patients
question
What was Ralph Waldo Emerson's central message about what the individual had to "transcend"?
answer
Existing customs
→ Emerson explained that people were trapped by inherited customs and institutions. They wore the ideas of earlier times—New England Calvinism, for example—as a kind of "faded masquerade" and needed to shed those values.
question
How did Shaker communities become self-sustaining and even comfortable?
answer
By perfecting their crafts
→ The Shakers developed the particular reputation for quality furniture making. This trade made them self-sustaining, even comfortabl
question
Why did Ralph Waldo Emerson's ideas have the greatest impact on the middle class?
answer
The middle class had already embraced moral perfection and moral free agency.
→ The middle class accepted Emerson because his ideas on individualism closely resembled the middle-class belief in moral perfection and moral free agency, as taught by Benjamin Franklin and Charles Grandison Finney.
question
How did African Americans of the urban North aim to accomplish social uplift from the 1790s onward?
answer
Through temperance and hard work
→ At a time when most African Americans still lived in slavery in the South and governments showed no interest in expanding rights, African Americans in the urban North had low expectations regarding equal civil rights or a sympathetic city government. The only prospect for improved living conditions was their own struggle for "respectability.
question
Joseph Smith said he translated which book from ancient hieroglyphics?
answer
The Book of Mormon
question
Which statement summarizes the publication of Herman Melville's Moby Dick?
answer
Middle-class readers rejected the dark narrative.
→ Moby Dick was a commercial failure. The middle-class audience that devoured sentimental American fiction refused to follow Melville into the dark, dangerous realm of individualism gone mad.
question
The Mormons differed from other communal experiments in their
answer
emphasis on traditional patriarchal authority.
→ The Mormons wanted a return to traditional patriarchal authority and rejected excessive individualism. They did not practice either complex marriage, as did the Oneidians, or celibacy, as did the Shakers.
question
How did the federal government respond to abolition between 1836 and 1844?
answer
By blocking debate of antislavery petitions in Congress
→ The federal government's response to abolition was mostly negative and included the House of Representatives passing a gag rule to automatically table antislavery petitions, although when President Andrew Jackson asked Congress to ban abolitionist literature from the mails, Congress did not act.
question
Why did the Georgia legislature offer a $5,000 reward for the capture of William Lloyd Garrison?
answer
Legislators charged Garrison with inciting rebellion.
→ The Georgia legislature offered a $5,000 reward for kidnapping Garrison and bringing him to the South to be tried (or lynched) for inciting rebellion. But by writing against slavery and for abolition, Garrison had not broken any law.
question
Mother Ann's followers were known by what name?
answer
Shakers.
question
Based on this chart, which of the following may have contributed to the largest surge of immigration in the nineteenth century?
answer
External factors
→ Immigration was at its highest in the late 1840s and early 1850s, as a result of the failed German revolutions and the Irish potato famine.
question
What was Margaret Fuller's most significant contribution to transcendental philosophy?
answer
She believed that men and women were equally capable of transcendence.
→ Fuller's greatest contribution to transcendentalist philosophy came with her expansion of the ideas of individualism to women.
question
What was the American Anti-Slavery Society's most successful tactic in affecting public opinion?
answer
Mailing abolitionist pamphlets throughout the country
→ The American Anti-Slavery Society's mail campaign helped to spread their message and attracted thousands to the cause.
question
Perfectionists of the early 1800s believed that freedom from sin was possible
answer
because the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred.
→ Perfectionists believed that the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred and that people could therefore achieve perfection in themselves and society with complete freedom from sin.
question
Based on this map, which area of the country would most likely be called the "Cotton Belt"?
answer
The area with a slave population of 50 percent or more from Georgia to Texas
→ This region was home to a relatively high percentage of slaves in the population because it was the focus of the expansion of slavery in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
question
What effect did Albert Brisbane believe that the formation of groups called phalanxes would have on gender relations?
answer
They would liberate women.
→ Brisbane advocated the phalanx as a way of liberating women through its communalism and sharing of labor, including housework.
question
Which of the following statements is accurate, based on this map?
answer
There were virtually no communal experiments in the South.
→ With the exception of the Nashoba experiment in Mississippi and two communities in Texas, there were no utopian communal experiments in the South.
question
How did northern white populations respond to African Americans' efforts to gain "respectability" in the early republic?
answer
They lashed out violently.
→ The black quest for respectability elicited a violent response in Boston, Pittsburgh, and other northern cities among whites who refused to accept African Americans as their social equals.
question
John Humphrey Noyes embraced which strategy as a means to liberate individuals and reform relations between men and women?
answer
Complex marriage
→ In order to reform gender relations, Noyes, a perfectionist, advocated complex marriage, where all community members were married to one another.
question
In his An Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World, who justified and advocated slave rebellions?
answer
David Walker
→ A self-educated author, Walker ridiculed the religious pretensions of slaveholders, justified slave rebellion, and in biblical language warned of a slave revolt if justice were delayed.
question
What was one of the strategies that evangelical abolitionists used to attack slavery beginning in the 1830s?
answer
Bombarding Congress with petitions to end slavery
→ Between 1835 and 1838, the American Anti-Slavery Society bombarded Congress with petitions containing nearly 500,000 signatures. They demanded the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, an end to the interstate slave trade, and a ban on admission of new slave states.
question
What was the most common response of white Americans to the abolitionist movement?
answer
Opposition to the movement
→ The most common response of white Americans to the abolition movement was opposition
question
What was one reason that John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community, rejected monogamy?
answer
He hoped to free women from their status as the property of their husbands.
→ The founder of Oneida, Noyes rejected monogamy in part to free women from their status as the property of their husbands, as they were by custom and by common law.
question
By the 1840's, approximately one thousand escaped slaves reached freedom in northern states or Canada each year in what way?
answer
Receiving help from the Underground Railroad.
question
What was the name of the informal network of whites and free blacks in cities throughout the South that aided escaped slaves in their painstaking journey north?
answer
The Underground Railroad
question
Which statement assesses the historical significance of the Shakers, Fourierists, and Oneidians?
answer
They radically questioned sexual norms and class divisions.
→ These utopian communities stood as countercultural blueprints for a more egalitarian social and economic order. The radical challenge to traditional norms of sexuality and gender and their opposition to capitalist principles and class divisions tell us much about the transformation that American society underwent during that time.
question
Why did the Mormons move their communities several times?
answer
They were persecuted by other groups.
→ Constantly harassed by anti-Mormons in upstate New York, where the faith was founded, Joseph Smith struggled to find a secure home for his new religion. He and his people tried to settle in Jackson County, Missouri, but were forced out by neighbors who did not want them and then moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, where agitation from local peoples led to Smith's arrest and murder
question
William Lloyd Garrison's insistence on broadening the abolitionist agenda split the organization by pushing out which group?
answer
Those who did not support women's rights
→ Garrison's insistence on including other reforms, especially his backing of women's rights, split the abolitionist movement.
question
Why did the Mormon community in Utah succeed?
answer
Shared hard work
→ Using cooperative labor and an irrigation system based on communal water rights, the Mormon pioneers quickly spread agricultural communities along the base of the Wasatch Range.
question
What statement describes the Mormon practice of polygamy in the nineteenth century?
answer
It was opposed by some within their church as well as non-Mormon Christians outside it.
→ Joseph Smith's pronouncement of polygamy as a divinely sanctioned practice caused some dissent from within the religious sect and provided antagonistic non-Mormon Christians with extra ammunition with which to attack Mormons
question
An 1852 article titled "You Shall Not Sell" in the American Temperance Magazine stated that words "are a delusion. . . . The drunkard's mental and physical condition pronounces them an absurdity. . . . Reason with a man when all reason has fled, and it is doubtful whether he or you is the greater fool. . . . Place this man we have been describing out of the reach of temptation. . . . Thus, and thus only, will reformation and temperance be secured. And how is this accomplished? Never except through the instrumentality of the law." What point was the author of the article trying to make?
answer
That laws could bring about temperance where other efforts failed
→ The author of the article argued that past efforts of moral suasion had reached their limits and that the state had to impose temperance with the force of law.
question
The main motivation for Nat Turner's revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831 was
answer
Christian faith.
→ After his master separated Turner from his wife, he became deeply spiritual. Turner talked about a religious vision in which "the Spirit" explained that "Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first."
question
What former minister who moved to Concord, Massachusetts, was the leading voice of transcendentalism?
answer
Ralph Waldo Emerson
→ Emerson was born in Boston and had attended divinity school at Harvard before he became the nation's leading transcendentalist philosopher.
question
Phalanxes were based on the ideas of which French utopian?
answer
Charles Fourier
→ Phalanxes were based on the ideas of the French utopian Charles Fourier.
question
Which work by Henry David Thoreau asserted that individuals could redeem themselves by resisting government through loyalty to a higher moral law?
answer
"Resistance to Civil Government"
→ Thoreau, who viewed the Mexican War as a naked scheme to extend slavery, refused to pay taxes and submitted to arrest. In 1848, he published "Resistance to Civil Government," in which he argued that individuals could redeem themselves by resisting government through loyalty to a higher moral law.
question
Conversations on Common Things (1824) was written by what woman reformer of the early and mid-nineteenth century?
answer
Dorothea Dix
→ By 1832, Dix, a reformer of public institutions, had started charity schools and published seven books, including Conversations on Common Things, a treatise on natural science and moral improvement.
question
Why were most teachers women by the 1850s?
answer
School boards believed that women were better suited for the profession.
→ Local school boards heeded Catharine Beecher's argument that "energetic and benevolent women" were better qualified than men to impart moral and intellectual instruction to the young. In addition, the boards liked the fact that they could pay female teachers less than they had to pay male teachers.
question
How did abolitionist women frequently violate social taboos in the 1830s?
answer
They spoke to mixed audiences that included men and women.
→ As abolitionist women attacked slavery, they frequently violated social taboos by speaking to mixed audiences of men and women.
question
After the murder of Joseph Smith, who led Mormon settlers to the Great Salt Lake Valley?
answer
Brigham Young
→ After the murder of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young led Mormon settlers to the Great Salt Lake Valley.
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