Reform Movement Showcase

Using primary sources, research the reform movements in the United States in the early to mid-19th century, concentrating on one of the following and considering its connections to other aspects of reform: a. the Abolitionist movement, the reasons individual men and women (e.g., Frederick Douglass, Abbey Kelley Foster, William Lloyd Garrison Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Charles Lennox Remond, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, David Walker, Theodore Weld) fought for their cause, and the responses of southern and northern white men and women to abolitionism. b. the women's rights and suffrage movements, their connections with abolitionism, and the expansion of women's educational opportunities (e.g., Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Fuller, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, Mary Lyon and the founding of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, later Mt. Holyoke College). c. Horace Mann's campaign for free compulsory public education, increased literacy rates, and the growth of newspaper and magazine publishing d. the movement to provide supports for people with disabilities, such as the founding of schools for students with cognitive, hearing, or vision disabilities; and the establishment of asylums for people with mental illness e. the Transcendentalist movement (e.g., the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, and the concepts of materialism, liberty, appreciation of the natural world, self-reliance, abolitionism, and civil disobedience).