Glossary

American Society for the Promotion of Temperance

Organized in 1826, this society was the first formal national temperance organization. Led by socially prominent clergy and laypeople, it called for total abstinence from distilled liquor.

Charles Grandison Finney

Known as the "father of modern revivalism", Finney was one of the leaders of the Second Great Awakening.

Dorothea Dix

One of the foremost social or humanitarian reformers of the antebellum period, Dix waged a lifelong crusade to reform the treatment of the mentally ill.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention, which was held in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. The convention drew up a Declaration of Sentiments modeled after the Declaration of Independence.

Magdalene societies

These associations of the 1830s and 1840s sought to rehabilitate prostitutes and discourage male solicitation and were one of the most dramatic attempts at moral reform.

Maine laws

Laws that restricted the manufacture and sale of alcohol became known as "Maine laws" because that state enacted the first statewide prohibition law in 1851.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson, one of the foremost intellectuals of his era, was the central figure in the transcendentalist movement, which espoused the belief that people can transcend ordinary understanding and find truth through intuition.

William Ellery Channing

Channing was the nation's leading exponent of religious liberalism, which maintained that humankind was basically good. His 1819 sermon proclaimed the principles that became the basis for American Unitarianism.

William Lloyd Garrison

In 1831 Garrison began publishing The Liberator, a militant abolitionist newspaper that was the country's first publication to demand "immediate emancipation," by which he meant the immediate and unconditional release of slaves from bondage without compensation to slaveowners.

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