Syllabus: HSTY2034

Week 10: The Age of Reform

Lecture 1: The New Middle Class
Lecture 2: the Spirit of Reform

Tutorial: Radicals and Reformers

Essential Reading:

This week you must find your own reading. Go online and look up information on radicals and reformers active in America during the period 1800-1860. Pick a favorite radical and find out as much as you can about him/her - activities, beliefs, reform objectives, background, achievements etc. Expect to discuss 'your' reformer in class this week. If you need a brief overview of the various nineteenth-century reform movements see Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers .

Questions:

While you're doing this assignment keep in mind these questions: what general social, cultural, and political changes gave rise to the reform spirit? What was the relationship between religion and reform? How did abolitionism and the women's movement intersect? Who was drawn to reform movements and why? What did they hope to achieve and how should we understand their efforts (i.e. as politically conservative, radical etc.?)

Further Reading: Northern Reform Movements

Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981).

Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

Nancy Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeepers' Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978).

Steven Mintz, Moralists And Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978).

Further Reading: Separate Spheres

Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: 'Woman's Sphere' in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

Nancy F. Cott, "Passionless: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850,"Signs 4 (Winter 1978): 219-36.

Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).