1.Chapter 15
The Ferment of Reform and Culture 1790–1860
2.At huge, daylong encampments, repentant sinners dedicated themselves to lives of personal rectitude and social reform. Fire-and-brimstone preachers like the one depicted here inspired convulsions, speaking in tongues, and ecstatic singing and dancing among the converted. Out of this religious upheaval grew many of the movements for social improvement in the pre-Civil War decades, including the abolitionist crusade.
Religious Camp Meeting by J. Maze Burbank, 1839
New Bedford Whaling Museum
3.This painting was one of a series of twenty-two recording the beginnings of the Mormon Church, created by a Danish convert who migrated to the Great Salt Lake valley in 1857. The artist stitched the paintings together into a huge scroll and carried it with him as he lectured throughout the West. Mormon founder Smith and his followers felt a special duty to carry their faith to the Indians, whom they considered one of the lost tribes of Israel. That did not stop the Mormons, however, from driving Indians from the Utah Territory to free up land for their own settlement.
Joseph Smith Preaching to the Indians, by Carl Christian Anton Christensen
Brigham Young University Art Museum
4.After Joseph Smith’s murder at Carthage in 1844, the Mormons abandoned their thriving settlement at Nauvoo, Illinois (which had about twenty thousand inhabitants in 1845) and set out for the valley of the Great Salt Lake, then still part of Mexico. When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 brought the vast Utah Territory into the United States, the Mormons rapidly expanded their desert colony, which they called Deseret, especially along the “Mormon Corridor” that stretched from Salt Lake to southern California.
The Mormon World
Copyright (c) Houghton Mifflin Company. All Rights Reserved.
5.Stark and simple by latter-day standards, the one-room schoolhouse nevertheless contributed richly to the development of the young Republic.
The Country School, by Winslow Homer, 1871
St. Louis Art Museum
6.Dorothea Dix (1802–1887)
A tireless reformer, Dorothea Dix worked mightily to improve the treatment of the mentally ill. At the outbreak of the Civil War, she was appointed superintendent of women nurses for the Union forces.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
7.Temperance Banner Lithograph, by Kellogg and Comstock, c. 1848–1850
Among the many evils of alcohol, reformers fulminated especially against its corrupting effects on family life. Here a young man is torn between a drink-bearing temptress and a maiden who exemplifies the virtues of womanly purity.
Connecticut Historical Society
9.The men in the antifeminist cartoon are sewing, tending the baby, and washing clothes. This scene seemed absurd then, but not a century later.
What It Would Be If Some Ladies Had Their Own Way
Stock Montage
10.The Shakers’ emphasis on simplicity and ingenuity, and their segregation of the sexes, were captured in this painting of the Bishop Hill community in Illinois. The prongs on the poles measured the distance between rows, and the knots on the rope showed the women how far apart to plant the corn.
Women Planting Corn, by Olof Krans, 1894–1896
Bishop Hill Historic Site, Bishop Hill, IL
11.An astute naturalist and a gifted artist, Audubon drew the birds of America in loving detail. Ironically, he had to go to Britain in the 1820s to find a publisher for his pioneering depictions of the unique beauty of American wildlife. Born in Haiti and educated in France, he achieved fame as America’s greatest ornithologist.
(left) Passenger Pigeons, by John Audubon; (right) John J. Audubon (1785–1851)
Collection of The New-York Historical Society
12.A sprawling, resplendent building, it formed the center of the Oneida Community’s life and was a stunning specimen of mid-nineteenth-century architectural and engineering achievement.
Mansion House
Oneida Community Mansion House
13.The Founding Father
John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886).
The Granger Collection
14.The fledgling community supported itself in part by bag manufacturing. Men and women shared equally in the bag-making process.
A Bag Bee on the Lawn of Mansion House
Oneida Community Mansion House
15.Early Advertising
Hawkers of patent medicines pioneered the techniques of modern advertising. Here a painkiller is promoted by invoking the totally irrelevant image of Molly Pitcher. The legendary subject of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, Pitcher reputedly took her fallen husband’s place at a cannon during the Revolutionary War Battle of Monmouth in 1778. What this exploit had to do with anesthetics is by no means clear, but it supposedly sold the product.
The Granger Collection
20.This painting and Melville’s Moby Dick vividly portray the hazards of whaling. Despite the dangers, it proved to be an important industry from colonial times to the end of the nineteenth century.
Capturing a Sperm Whale, painted by William Page from a sketch by C. B. Hulsart, 1835
Peabody Essex Museum