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| Drothea Dix | worked to improve the institutional treatment of the insane. Through her crusading investigations state mental hospitals were founded or expanded throughout the United States and in Canada. She also made important recommendations in penology. Dix was superintendent of Union army nurses during the Civil War. |
| Stephen Foster | was an American composer of songs whose words and music have become associated with the American South. Among his best-known songs are "Camptown Races" (1850), "Old Folks at Home," also known as "Swanee River" (1851), "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854), and "Old Black Joe" (1860). |
| James Russell Lowell | was one of the finest New England poets of the 19th century and a distinguished literary critic. His humorous poetry, such as The Biglow Papers (1848), is highly valued by modern readers, but he also dealt with lyrical themes and public affairs and wrote charmingly of the New England countryside. |
| Neal Dow | persuaded Maine to approve (1846) the first statewide prohibition law and then led attempts to secure such laws elsewhere; the Civil War interrupted this effort. |
| Washington Irving | - America's first successful professional man of letters, coincided with the early development of a distinctive national literature. |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes | a humorous and occasional poet, wrote "Old Ironsides," which saved the warship Constitution and made Holmes famous, breathes flaming patriotism, and "The Chambered Nautilus" and "Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts" blend scientific and religious interests. |
| Lucretia Mott | was an American Quaker preacher, abolitionist, and leading women's rights advocate. |
| James Fenimore Cooper | the most significant American novelist before Nathaniel Hawthorne and a member of the Knickerbocker group, was an author of international stature and continuing influence. His works have been widely translated; some, like his Leatherstocking Tales, are considered world classics. |
| William Gilmore Simms | American poet, novelist, and critic that is best known for his historical novel The Yemassee (1835), which conveys the impact of white civilization on Indian life through the conflict (1715) between the British and the South Carolina Yemassee Indians. Considered more realistic than his model, James Fenimore Cooper, Simms was a supporter of the South and, in criticism, a detractor of Herman Melville. |
| Horace Mann | was an educator and public official. served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1827-33) and in the State Senate (1834-37). He was active in codifying the state laws, in establishing the first public hospital for the insane, and in forming the first state board of education in the country. |
| Peter Cartwright | was an American Methodist preacher, the most famous of the itinerant preachers called the circuit riders. He preached his simple message of salvation and holiness in the American West for almost 70 years. Cartwright was a strong opponent of slavery and served for 16 years as a member of the Illinois state legislature. His only political defeat was by Abraham Lincoln in a race for the U.S. Congress in 1846. |
| Noah Webster | statesman, lawyer, and orator, was his era's foremost advocate of American nationalism. |
| Elizabeth Cady Stanton | the American reformer was a founder of the organized women's rights movement in the United States. She was active in the antislavery and temperance movements but gave much of her time to women's issues. |
| William Cullen Bryant | was a journalist, literary critic, and public speaker, and the first significant poet in 19th-century American literature. Along with the landscape paintings of the so-called Hudson River artists, a group that included many of his friends, his writings symbolize the intense love of nature prominent in the romantic period. |
| Edgar Allan Poe | produced some of the most enduring literary criticism of his time and some of the most musical poetry, but his reputation rests primarily on his contributions to fiction. |
| Susan B. Anthony | was an American pioneer of women's rights. Was an agent for the Daughters of Temperance and for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony helped to found (1866) the American Equal Rights Association in order to work for women's suffrage. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The American essayist and poet is considered the leading exponent of American transcendentalism, questioning the established views of literature, philosophy, and religion. |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | was the first American writer to apply artistic judgment to Puritan society. With his contemporaries Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe he initiated many of the enduring concerns of American fiction. Wrote the Scarlett Letter. |
| Robert Owen | was a Welsh industrialist and social reformer who had a strong influence on 19th-century utopian socialism. Owen believed that human character would be greatly improved in a cooperative society rather than in the traditional family. |
| Henry David Thoreau | is best known for Walden, an account of his experiment in simple living, and for the essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849). Whose doctrine of passive resistance influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.. Essentially a philosopher of individualism, Thoreau placed nature above materialism in private life and ethics above conformity in politics. |
| Herman Melville | Known primarily as the author of Moby Dick, he is widely regarded as one of America's greatest and most influential novelists. |
| Charles G. Finney | was an American lawyer, theologian, and revivalist. After practicing law in upstate New York, he experienced a dramatic conversion and became (1824) a Presbyterian minister. His revivals were immensely successful. They featured daring, new methods of evangelism--protracted meetings of nightly gatherings and the "anxious bench," where souls under conviction could pray for salvation. Finney encouraged people to exert themselves in becoming Christians and in overcoming social ills such as slavery. |
| William H. McGuffey | was an American educator who edited a series of reading textbooks, the Eclectic Readers, which were widely used in the late 19th century. |
| Joseph Smith | was the founder, prophet, and first president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). |
| Emma Willard | was a pioneer in the movement for higher education for women. Her introduction of mathematics and philosophy in her school for girls was a radical innovation. |
| Louis Agassiz | One of the most influential scientists of the 19th century; did pioneering work on fossil fish and was the originator of the concept of ice ages. |
| Walt Whitman | The greatest of 19th-century American poets. Two of his most famous works:"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!” commemorates the death of Lincoln. |
| John J. Audubon | was a French-American ornithologist noted for his bird drawings and paintings. Audubon had completed more than 400 paintings by 1838. Today's Audubon societies were named for him. |
| Henry Wadsworth Longellow | was the most popular and influential American poet of the 19th century and had the widest range and greatest technical skill of all the poets of "the flowering of New England." He influenced the poetic taste of generations of readers throughout the English-speaking world. |
| William H. Prescott | one of the greatest American historians, was a specialist on the Spanish conquest of the New World. His vivid style made him popular with the reading public, while his careful work based on archival sources made him one of the first American historians to use a more scientific approach. |
| Gilbert Stuart | a major American portrait painter of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, is among the greatest portraitists in the history of American art. He executed his earliest works in a provincial, quasi-primitive style. |
| John Greenleaf Whittier | One of the best-loved American poets of the 19th century; achieved a national reputation with his nostalgic poem "Snow-Bound" (1866), celebrating the rural world of New England. |
| Francis Parkman | one of America's great historians, vividly described the American wilderness and the Anglo-French struggle for mastery of North America. Wrote France and England in North America, it comprises seven separate studies describing the French explorers and their empire in North America, culminating in an epic account of the French and Indian War. |
| Brigham Young | was the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the first territorial governor of Utah. Besides establishing Salt Lake City as the center for the church, Young sent colonizing parties throughout Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and California where he helped found more than 350 cities and towns. |
| Phineas T. Barnum | was the most famous U.S. showman and a self-proclaimed "Prince of Humbugs." . In 1871, Barnum launched a mammoth traveling circus, museum, and menagerie, that eventually became known as the Barnum & Bailey Show. |
| Horace Greeley | a renowned American newspaper editor who founded the influential New York Tribune. His voice in national affairs was of great significance in the critical years before and during the Civil War. Few issues of the time escaped his notice. On all of them he had strong opinions, which he vigorously expounded in his widely read editorials. "For 35 years Horace Greeley was probably the greatest political force this country has ever known except Thomas Jefferson," said the New York World on the 100th anniversary of Greeley's birth. |
| American Temperance Society | founded in 1826. Began gathering pledges of abstinence of alcohol during the temperance movement. |
| Shakers | Beginning in England at a Quaker revival in 1747, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, also known as the Millennial Church, or the Alethians, came to be called Shakers because of the trembling induced in them by their religious fervor. Led by James and Jane Wardley, the so-called Shaking Quakers were a minor religious sect until Ann Lee became the head of the movement. |
| Unitarianism | Unitarianism is a form of Christianity that asserts that God is one person, the Father, rather than three persons in one, as the doctrine of the Trinity holds. In 1838, a divinity school address by Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that religious truth should be based on the authority of inner consciousness, not on external historical proofs. |
| Second Great Awakening | Beginning in 1795 and expanding tremendously through the 1840s, a new revival known as the Second Great Awakening appeared. Evangelists such as Charles G. Finney emphasized free will, divine forgiveness for all, and the need of each person to freely accept or reject salvation. |
| Hudson River School | a loosely knit group of American landscape painters active from about 1825 to 1875, most notably Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Asher B. Durand, John Frederick Kensett, Jaspar Cropsey, Frederick Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt. |
| Women's Rights Convention | In 1850 the National Women's Rights Convention was held, led by Lucy Stone, an early activist. Both groups coalesced in the formation (1863) of the Women's National Loyal League, under Susan B. Anthony, who wrote and submitted in 1878 a proposed right-to-vote amendment to the Constitution. |
| Knickerbocker group | a loose-knit school of writers that flourished in New York City during the first half of the 19th century. Its members shared similar literary tastes, writing more to entertain than to instruct, and a similar goal--to make New York City an important literary center in the United States and to nurture a national literature. |
| Declaration of Sentiments | Stanton drafted a Declaration of Sentiments that paralleled the wording of the Declaration of Independence and insisted, over some objections, on adoption of a women's suffrage resolution. |
| transcendentalism | New England Transcendentalism was a religious, literary, and philosophical movement that flourished especially between 1836, when the essay Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published, and 1844, when the semiofficial journal of the movement, the The Dial, ceased publication. Influenced by Unitarianism, Transcendentalists denied the existence of miracles, preferring a Christianity that rested on the teachings of Christ rather than on his supposed deeds. |
| Millerites | Arroused by the preaching of William Miller. The faithful remnant of Millerites coalesced into several religious bodies, the most important of which are the Seventh-Day Adventists and the Advent Christian Church. Leaders of the former group had been influenced by Sabbatarian Baptists; thus, in that denomination, Saturday rather than Sunday is kept as the Sabbath. The most important early leader of the Seventh-Day Adventists was Ellen G. White (1827-1915). |
| Deism | the thought of 17th- and 18th- century freethinkers who sought to maintain a belief in God while making it compatible with the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Believing that the development of science was compatible with a belief in God as first cause, creator, and source of universal and immutable laws, they also felt that immutable laws ruled out miracles or divine intervention. Many freethinkers concluded that if God reveals himself in scientific laws, he cannot reveal himself through a person's literal reading of the Bible. They also argued that moral law could be derived from natural law rather than from revelation. |
| Mormons | members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often called Latter-day Saints. Joseph Smith organized the church in Fayette, N.Y., in 1830. Widely spread by Brigham young. |
