| A | B |
|---|
| The Second Great Awakening | A massive religious revival that lasted several decades, a shift away from the reason of the Enlightenment to emotions, and a wave of reform movements |
| The Erie Canal being built and major economic changes coming to the western part of the New York | "The Burned-Over" District is particularly suitable for religious revivals and the emergence of new religious groups such as the Mormons and Millerites |
| The persecution of the Mormons and Joseph Smith's murder in Illinois | Brigham Young led the Mormons to Utah |
| The efforts of Dorothea Dix | Prisons and insane asylums were reformed |
| Boredom, alcohol was sometimes safer to drink than water, and alcohol was cheap and easy to produce | Antebellum Americans drank a lot- much more than the average American today |
| A need to improve work efficiency, protect the family from alcoholism, and many immigrants liked to drink | The temperance movement gains steam- especially the American Temperance Society |
| The reforms of Horace Mann | Education was improved with compulsory attendance laws, a longer school year, and increased standards for teaching, etc. |
| The increasing number of colleges | Colleges were no longer places to train ministers as they had been in colonial America |
| The importance of the abolition movement | All other antebellum reform movements, especially women's suffrage, take a backseat |
| The Seneca Falls Convention (1848) | Delegates introduced the "Declaration of Sentiments" |
| The emergence of utopian communities | Failed because they ran counter to human nature and American values of individualism |
| Primitive medical practices | Doctors were to be feared because of the use of leaches, a lack of understanding of disease, and the pseudoscience of phrenology |
| The nationalism in the aftermath of the War of 1812 | Emergence of a distinctly American form of art and literature |
| Romanticism | Antebellum art and literature was dominated by feedings and emotion (ex: the Hudson River School and Transcendentalism) |
| Henry David Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience | Nonviolent protest against a poll tax during the Mexican War later inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. |
