• Discuss the impact of technological innovation and the idea of "progress" on American culture, especially art and literature.

• Describe the new evangelical Protestantism that produced the wave of religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening.

• Characterize the motives and success of the various utopian communities and perfectionist experiments that arose during the early nineteenth century.

• Discuss how evangelical religious reform prompted the rise of an increasingly aggressive antislavery movement and an equally militant reaction.

• Describe the expansion of the antislavery movement to include African Americans, women, and political activity.

• Outline the efforts of the "Benevolent Empire" to reform American society through a campaign of nativism, education, and religious missions.

1790–1800 Beginning of the Second Great Awakening.

1818 Disestablishment of Connecticut’s state church.

1823 James Fenimore Cooper publishes his first "Leatherstocking" novel.

1824 Robert Owen brings perfectionism to America from Scotland.

1825–37 Charles Grandison Finney leads his evangelical crusade.

1826 American Temperance Society founded.

1830 National Negro Convention Movement established.

Joseph Smith publishes The Book of Mormon.

1831 William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing The Liberator.

1833 Disestablishment of Massachusetts’s state church.

Parliament outlaws slavery in the British West Indies.

Antislavery debates at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati.

American Anti-Slavery Society founded.

1836 House of Representative enacts its "gag rule" forbidding discussion of slavery.

Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his essay "Nature."

1837 Elijah Lovejoy murdered by an anti-abolitionist mob in Illinois.

1840 American Anti-Slavery Society divides.

American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society founded.

Liberty Party nominates James G. Birney for president.

1841–58 Fourierist phalanxes spread across America.

1844 Mormon leader Joseph Smith is murdered by a mob in Illinois.

1845 Irish potato famine begins.

1846 Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes his short story "The Celestial Railroad."

1847 John Humphrey Noyes founds the Oneida community in New York.

1848 Frederick Douglass begins publishing North Star.

1851 Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick.

1853 New York’s Crystal Palace exhibition.

1854 Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden.