Week 10 · Chapter

Chapter 10 — Reform, Religion & Reawakening

U.S. History to 1877 Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~55–65 minutes · Objectives 1 and 6 · Read it first this week, before the lecture and the slide deck.

In plain language

This week is about the decades from the 1820s to 1850, when a wave of religious revivals (meetings meant to stir people to a new or renewed faith) swept the country. Many people who joined a church in those years also joined a reform movement (an organized effort by ordinary citizens to change a practice or a law they judged wrong). They fought drinking, built free schools, demanded better care for people with mental illness, and called for an end to slavery. Women and Black Americans led some of the strongest of these movements. You will read one life story, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which Truth told aloud and another woman wrote down.

Why you already care about this

Picture a reform society meeting in a canal town in western New York in the 1830s. Its members have raised money for one cause this year. One member wants a temperance hall, where people pledge to stop drinking. Another wants a free school. A third wants a better asylum. A fourth wants to print an antislavery newspaper. Which cause would you fund, and how would you decide?

You have probably sat in a meeting like that. A student club picks one fundraiser. A congregation chooses which neighbors to help. A group chat argues about which petition to share. The question underneath is old: when ordinary people want to fix their country, where do they start, and who gets to speak?

In 1829 a free Black man in Boston, David Walker, published a pamphlet urging resistance to slavery. In 1848 about 300 women and men met at Seneca Falls, New York, to demand women's rights. In 1850 Sojourner Truth's life story appeared in print. You will read the people who spoke up, and you will ask whose words reached the page.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

describe the Second Great Awakening as history, from camp meetings to new churches;
explain how the revivals fed temperance, common schools, and asylum reform;
explain immediate abolition and name Black abolitionists among its leaders;
source a dictated narrative by naming both its teller and its writer;
keep the Truth narrative's two dated events apart and check them against another source;
explain the Seneca Falls Convention and show that its demands went beyond the vote;
sort sources as primary or secondary.

Hook to keep: ask who spoke and who held the pen.

Carry this sentence with you: Truth spoke, Gilbert wrote — you name both.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 built the four moves of sourcing, contextualization, close reading, and corroboration. Week 3 named the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s and read an oral account as a primary source. Week 5 read the Declaration of Independence (1776) and Abigail Adams's letter asking her husband to remember the ladies. Week 9 followed the market revolution, the Erie Canal, and Jacksonian democracy to the nullification crisis of 1832.
This week: the Second Great Awakening; temperance, common schools, and asylum and prison reform; immediate abolition and its Black leaders; The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850); and the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 with its Declaration of Sentiments.
How they connect: Week 9 showed the vote widening for white men and the country growing richer through canals and markets. This week asks who was still left out, and what they and their allies did about it.
Where we're going next: Week 11 follows the country west, into expansion and the war with Mexico.

Week 3 gave you the First Great Awakening, a wave of colonial revivals. This week a second wave arrives, larger and longer. Week 3 also gave you the oral account, a spoken account of a person's own experience recorded by someone else. Hold that idea close, because this week's document works the same way. Old life stories are hard to read: long sentences, old spellings, and a writer standing between you and the teller. The course is built to be supportive of that work. Each section takes one step.

1. Read the Second Great Awakening as history: revivals and camp meetings

Imagine a farm family in Kentucky around 1800. They load food and blankets into a wagon and drive for a day. At the end of the road they find a field full of tents, wagons, and thousands of people. Preachers speak from stands under the trees, morning and night, for days.

That gathering was a camp meeting, and it was new. You study it the way historians study any event: what people believed, what they did, and what the sources show. The course takes no side on any belief. It reads what believers said and did.

The Second Great Awakening was the wave of Protestant religious revivals that began around 1800 and ran through the first half of the nineteenth century. In it, many preachers taught that a person could choose conversion and live a more moral life. A revival is a religious meeting, or a series of meetings, meant to stir listeners to conversion and a renewed faith. A camp meeting is an outdoor revival lasting several days, at which families camped on the grounds to hear preaching.

The Library of Congress explains that around 1800 revivals began in two places: a quieter one in New England and a more exuberant one in Kentucky. The Kentucky revivals produced the camp meeting. The Cane Ridge revival of 1801, near Lexington, was one of them. Presbyterian ministers organized the first camp meetings, and Methodists later carried them east.

The preaching carried an idea that mattered for everything else this week. Many preachers taught that men and women could learn not to sin, the National Park Service writes. That broke with an older teaching that each soul's fate was settled in advance. If a person could change, perhaps a town could change, and perhaps a nation could. Revivals swept upstate New York so often that it was called the Burned-Over District. The same region became a center of reform.

Black Americans joined the revivals in large numbers. Yet at a Methodist camp meeting in Virginia in 1809, an architect's sketch shows the seats and tents divided by sex and by race, the Library of Congress notes. Black Methodists who faced that kind of segregation formed their own churches. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1816 by Richard Allen and his colleagues in Philadelphia, was one.

Worked example — reading a camp meeting through the sources. You take what the Library of Congress shows and ask what it can and cannot tell you.

What people did: families traveled to the grounds, camped for days, and heard preaching. The exhibit describes this from sketches and prints.
What people believed: many preachers taught that a person could choose conversion. The National Park Service says so in its own words.
What the sketch of 1809 shows: seating divided by sex and by race.
What the sources cannot show: whether any one person's conversion was sincere. That is a question about belief, and a historian does not settle it.

In words: the sources show what revival meetings looked like and what preachers taught; they do not tell you whether the teaching was true, and the course does not ask.

Misconception check. Students often think a history of religion has to decide whether the religion was right. That is tempting, because the preachers themselves spoke with great certainty. But a historian reads beliefs as evidence of what people thought and did. The cure is to ask what the source shows people believing and doing, and to stop there.

Pause and choose one. (a) Write two sentences on what the divided seating at a camp meeting shows about who belonged. (b) Write two sentences on why a revival preacher's sermon is good evidence of the preacher's message but weak evidence of what every listener believed.

2. Follow the revivals into reform: temperance, schools, and asylums

Go back to the reform society from the opening. Its members are mostly churchgoers, and they believe a better life is possible for their town. The question is what to fix first.

People in the 1820s and 1830s asked that question in thousands of meetings, and you can follow their answers. Many of them belonged to a benevolent society: a voluntary group of private citizens that worked to spread religion or cure a social ill, for example by printing tracts or campaigning for sobriety. The Library of Congress ties these societies directly to the revivals. A converted person, the evangelists taught, should show it by helping others.

Three reform movements grew from that energy.

Temperance is the reform movement that urged people to drink less alcohol or to give it up entirely, often through pledges, lectures, and local societies. In Waterloo, New York, a Quaker family held temperance meetings in the room above their drugstore, the National Park Service reports.
A common school is a free public school paid for by taxes and open to the children of a town. Education reformers built them in the decades before the Civil War.
Asylum reform is the movement to move people with mental illness out of jails and almshouses and into state hospitals, then called asylums, where reformers hoped they would be treated humanely.

Asylum reform had a famous voice. Massachusetts opened its first state asylum, at Worcester, in 1833. In 1843 Dorothea Dix presented a memorial, a formal written statement of facts asking a legislature to act, to the Massachusetts legislature. It documented the poor conditions that most towns provided for their residents with disabilities, the National Park Service reports. Before the Civil War, Dix crusaded for better hospitals and state-funded care.

Worked example — the reform society decides. You help the illustrative society weigh its four choices.

Temperance hall: reformers argued drink ruined families. The society would be acting on a revival teaching, self-control.
Free school: a common school would teach every child in town, paid for by taxes rather than fees.
Asylum: a memorial like Dix's could press the state to build a hospital instead of using the jail.
Antislavery newspaper: the next section shows why this choice was the most dangerous one.

In words: each cause rested on the same belief that people and towns could be improved; the society's choice shows its priorities, not which cause was most needed.

Misconception check. Students often think the reformers were mostly government officials. That is tempting, because some reforms ended in new laws and state hospitals. But most reform began with private citizens in voluntary societies, and laws came later, if at all. The cure is to ask who started an effort before you ask who passed the law.

Caveat: the reformers often aimed at the poor and at immigrants, and some of their help came with strict rules. Reading them in their time explains their goals; it does not mean every target of reform welcomed it.

3. Hear the abolitionists: immediate abolition and Black leadership

Think about a newspaper editor in a small Northern town. A reader brings in a letter calling slavery a sin that must end now. The editor knows many subscribers will cancel. Some may throw stones through the window. Does the editor print it?

Many editors refused. Would you? Abolitionism is the movement to end slavery in the United States, and in the 1830s its leading wing demanded immediate abolition: an end to slavery at once, without delay and without payment to enslavers. It grew through newspapers, lecture tours, and petitions. Two older ideas stood in its way. Gradual emancipation was a plan to end slavery slowly over years or decades, often by freeing only children born after a set date. The colonization movement was the effort to send free Black Americans to Africa, which most Black Americans opposed because the United States was their home.

Black abolitionists were free and formerly enslaved Black Americans who fought to end slavery as writers, speakers, organizers, and editors. They were among the movement's leading voices, and they often led the way. Three figures show it.

Walker's Appeal is the pamphlet David Walker, a free Black man in Boston, published in 1829. It urged Black Americans to resist slavery and racism, and it attacked colonization, the National Park Service writes. Sailors carried copies into Southern ports, where officials feared it.
The Liberator is the antislavery newspaper William Lloyd Garrison began publishing in Boston in 1831. Garrison had once backed gradual emancipation and colonization. Contact with Black Americans in Boston and Baltimore led him to reject both, the National Park Service writes, and to take up Black abolitionists' demand for an immediate end to slavery.
Maria W. Stewart, a free Black woman in Boston, gave public lectures in 1832 and 1833 to audiences of men and women. Few women of any race spoke in public then. She called on Black Americans, women among them, to claim their rights.

Worked example — ordering the abolitionist voices. Put the three moments in order and say who influenced whom.

Walker's Appeal: 1829.
The Liberator's first issue: 1831.
Stewart's lectures: 1832 and 1833.
The gap from Walker's Appeal to The Liberator: 1831 − 1829 = 2 years.

In words: a Black writer's demand came first, and a white editor's newspaper took it up two years later; Black abolitionists did not follow the movement, they helped start it.

Misconception check. Students often think most Northerners were abolitionists before the Civil War. That is tempting, because the North had ended or was ending slavery within its own borders. But immediate abolition stayed a minority movement in the North, and many Northerners opposed it. The cure is to keep two claims apart: a state without slavery is not a state of abolitionists.

Pause and choose one. (a) Write two sentences on why an editor might fear printing an abolitionist letter in the 1830s. (b) Write two sentences on what it shows that Garrison changed his mind after talking with Black Americans.

4. Source a dictated narrative: Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert

Imagine your grandmother telling her life story while you type it into a laptop. You choose the order. You fix the grammar. You add a sentence of your own about how brave she was. Later, someone reads the printed pages. Whose words are they reading?

That is the question you will ask of this week's Primary Source Workshop document. A dictated narrative is a life story told aloud by one person, the teller, and written down by another, the writer, so that a careful reader names both and asks whose words are on the page. The teller is the person whose life a dictated narrative tells and who spoke it aloud. The writer is the person who set it down on paper and chose its words.

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the dictated narrative of 1850 in which Sojourner Truth told her life and Olive Gilbert wrote it down. The Avalon Project keeps the text. Truth was born Isabella, enslaved in Ulster County, New York, and Dutch was her first language. She took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843, the National Park Service records, and toured the country speaking against slavery.

Worked example — sourcing the narrative. You take the four moves in order.

Sourcing: teller, Sojourner Truth; writer, Olive Gilbert; dated 1850; a dictated narrative; kept by the Avalon Project.
Contextualization: Truth had met William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass in Massachusetts. Garrison published the book in 1850, the National Park Service says, and that same year Truth spoke at a national women's rights convention in Worcester.
Close reading: the first pinned fragment says she was

"born, as near as she can now calculate, between the years 1797 and 1800"

Notice the word she. The narrative speaks about Truth, not as Truth. The words on the page are Gilbert's report of what Truth told her.

The numbers inside the fragment: the narrative gives a range, not a year. 1800 − 1797 = 3 years of uncertainty. When the narrative appeared in 1850, Truth was between 1850 − 1800 = 50 and 1850 − 1797 = 53 years old.

The reading in one plain sentence: The narrative shows how Truth's life was told through Gilbert's pen in 1850; it is evidence of Truth's account as Gilbert wrote it, not a text in Truth's own written words.

Misconception check. Students often think a dictated narrative is the teller's own writing. That is tempting, because the book carries the teller's name in its title. But the teller spoke and the writer chose the words, the order, and the comments. The cure is sourcing: name both the teller and the writer every time, as the course does for Truth and Gilbert.

Limitation: no one can now separate every sentence into Truth's part and Gilbert's part. You can only notice the places where the writer's voice shows, and read with both people in mind.

Pause and choose one. (a) Write two sentences on what Truth may have gained by telling her story to a writer. (b) Write two sentences on what a reader may lose when a writer stands between the teller and the page.

5. Keep two dates apart: the promise and the State

Think about a manager who promises you a raise one year before the union contract says you must get one. The promised day comes, and the manager refuses. Later, the contract's date arrives anyway. If you told that story years afterward, you would need two dates, and a listener could mix them up.

Truth's narrative gives you the same problem. Its second pinned passage says, in paraphrase, that the subject of the narrative was to have been free on 4 July 1827. That was the day her enslaver had promised her free papers, a written document that recorded a person's legal freedom. He promised them a year before the date the State had fixed. When the day came, he refused to keep his promise. Elsewhere, the narrative places her emancipation by the State in 1828.

Worked example — two events, two years. You keep the events apart and measure them.

The promised free papers: 1827, the day her enslaver chose and then broke.
Emancipation by the State, as the narrative places it: 1828.
The gap: 1828 − 1827 = 1 year, the year before that the narrative describes.
From the promised day to the narrative's printing: 1850 − 1827 = 23 years. The narrative recalls events from decades earlier.

Now corroborate. The National Park Service dates New York's final emancipation day to 1827, under a state law of 1817, and it says Truth freed herself and her infant daughter in 1826. That source complicates the narrative's own dating. You do not have to settle which date is right to read the narrative well. You have to keep the narrative's two events apart, name where each date comes from, and say plainly that another source disagrees.

In words: the narrative's 1827 dates a broken promise and its 1828 dates the State's action; a park service account dates the State's action to 1827, so a careful reader checks a dictated narrative against other sources.

Misconception check. Students often think the 1827 in the narrative is the year New York's law freed Truth. That is tempting, because the passage says she "was to have been free". But the narrative ties that day to her enslaver's promise, and it places the State's action in 1828. The cure is to ask which event each date belongs to before you ask whether the date is right.

Honesty note: the dates matter less than what they record. A man who held Truth in slavery broke his word, and she took her freedom into her own hands. The narrative is grave evidence of that, whichever year a reader settles on.

6. Read Seneca Falls: the Declaration of Sentiments

Picture a small chapel in a mill town in July 1848. It is full. Women and men have come to talk about something new: women's rights. The document they discuss sounds almost like one every person there learned about in school.

The women's rights movement is the movement that began in the 1840s to win women equal rights in law, property, wages, schooling, marriage, the church, and voting. Its roots ran through abolition. In 1840 the World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, refused to seat women delegates. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met there, the National Park Service writes.

The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women's rights convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. About 300 people attended, and 68 women and 32 men, 100 in all, signed its declaration, the National Park Service reports. Frederick Douglass attended and signed. The Declaration of Sentiments is the statement adopted there, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, that listed women's grievances and demanded equal rights, the vote among them.

Worked example — reading the model and the copy. You set the two declarations side by side.

The model: the Declaration of Independence (D09), a declaration by the Continental Congress, 1776, kept by the National Archives. Its pinned fragment reads

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"

The copy: the Declaration of Sentiments, 1848. In paraphrase, it repeats that line with women added beside men. You can check the wording at the National Park Service's transcript.
The gap between them: 1848 − 1776 = 72 years.
The grievances: the Sentiments says women were denied the elective franchise, the right to vote in elections. It also lists laws women had no voice in making, married women's loss of their property and wages, divorce and custody laws, closed colleges, and a lesser place in the church.

In words: the Sentiments borrowed the Declaration of Independence's form to claim its promise for women; it is evidence of what the convention demanded, not of what the law gave women in 1848.

Misconception check. Students often think the women's rights movement began with the vote and was only about the vote. That is tempting, because the vote became its best-known demand. But the Declaration of Sentiments listed property, wages, divorce, schooling, and the church beside the vote. The cure is to read the whole list of grievances, not only its most famous line.

Pause and choose one. (a) Write two sentences on why the convention chose the Declaration of Independence as its model. (b) Write two sentences on why the vote might have been the hardest demand for some signers to accept.

7. Sort the sources and measure the gaps

Think about two things on a library cart: a printed encyclopedia page about a famous survey, and a cassette tape of an elderly woman telling a researcher about her childhood. Which one was made by someone who lived through what it describes?

You have sorted sources since Week 1, and you can sort these two quickly. A primary source was made during the period under study, by a participant or a witness. A secondary source is a later interpretation. Two illustrative items from the course's source-sorting set close the week.

Worked example — sorting two sources. You sort items 11 and 12 of the source-sorting set (illustrative).

Item 11, an online encyclopedia entry summarizing the census: secondary. It was written later, to explain a record someone else made.
Item 12, an oral account recorded in the 1930s from a person born into slavery: primary, for that person's own experience, read with the gap in time in mind.
Count: one of each, 1 + 1 = 2 items keyed.
The link to this week: Truth's narrative works like item 12. It is a teller's own account set down by someone else, primary for her experience and read with both the gap in time and the writer in mind.

In words: who made a source, and when, decides whether it is primary or secondary; a writer's pen does not turn a teller's account into a secondary source, but it does mean you name both people.

Misconception check. Students often think a source recorded by someone else, or long after the events, cannot be primary. That is tempting, because Gilbert wrote the narrative and the oral account came decades later. But each one carries the teller's own account of her own life. The cure is to ask whose experience the source reports, then read it with the gap and the writer in mind.

The week's gaps, versus each other: the 72 years from the Declaration of Independence to Seneca Falls are about three times the 23 years from Truth's promised day to her narrative's printing. Both gaps remind you that people argue with old documents long after they are written.

Key terms

Camp meeting — an outdoor revival lasting several days, at which families camped in tents on the grounds to hear preaching, first held in the Kentucky revivals around 1800. (first used: 1. Read the Second Great Awakening as history: revivals and camp meetings)
Second Great Awakening — the wave of Protestant religious revivals that began around 1800 and ran through the first half of the nineteenth century, in which many preachers taught that a person could choose conversion and live a more moral life. (first used: 1. Read the Second Great Awakening as history: revivals and camp meetings)
Revival — a religious meeting or series of meetings meant to stir listeners to conversion and a renewed faith, often with emotional preaching and many people joining a church at once. (first used: 1. Read the Second Great Awakening as history: revivals and camp meetings)
Burned-Over District — the name given to upstate and western New York in the early nineteenth century because revivals swept through it so often; it also became a center of reform. (first used: 1. Read the Second Great Awakening as history: revivals and camp meetings)
African Methodist Episcopal Church — the independent Black Methodist church founded in 1816 by Richard Allen and his colleagues in Philadelphia after Black Methodists faced segregation in the Methodist Church. (first used: 1. Read the Second Great Awakening as history: revivals and camp meetings)
Benevolent society — a voluntary group of private citizens in the early nineteenth century that worked to spread religion or cure a social ill, for example by printing tracts or campaigning for sobriety. (first used: 2. Follow the revivals into reform: temperance, schools, and asylums)
Reform movement — an organized effort by private citizens to change a practice, a law, or an institution they judged wrong, such as drinking, the lack of free schools, the care of people in asylums, or slavery. (first used: 2. Follow the revivals into reform: temperance, schools, and asylums)
Temperance — the reform movement that urged people to drink less alcohol or to give it up entirely, often through pledges, lectures, and local societies. (first used: 2. Follow the revivals into reform: temperance, schools, and asylums)
Common school — a free public school paid for by taxes and open to the children of a town, the kind of school that education reformers built in the decades before the Civil War. (first used: 2. Follow the revivals into reform: temperance, schools, and asylums)
Asylum reform — the movement to move people with mental illness out of jails and almshouses and into state hospitals, then called asylums, where reformers hoped they would be treated humanely. (first used: 2. Follow the revivals into reform: temperance, schools, and asylums)
Memorial — a formal written statement of facts presented to a legislature to ask it to act, such as Dorothea Dix's memorial of 1843 on the poor conditions most Massachusetts towns provided for people with disabilities. (first used: 2. Follow the revivals into reform: temperance, schools, and asylums)
Abolitionism — the movement to end slavery in the United States; in the 1830s its leading wing demanded immediate abolition. (first used: 3. Hear the abolitionists: immediate abolition and Black leadership)
Immediate abolition — the demand that slavery end at once, without delay and without payment to enslavers, which grew in the 1830s through newspapers, lecture tours, and petitions. (first used: 3. Hear the abolitionists: immediate abolition and Black leadership)
Gradual emancipation — a plan to end slavery slowly over years or decades, often by freeing only children born after a set date, as several Northern states did. (first used: 3. Hear the abolitionists: immediate abolition and Black leadership)
Colonization movement — the early nineteenth-century effort to send free Black Americans to Africa, which most Black Americans opposed because the United States was their home. (first used: 3. Hear the abolitionists: immediate abolition and Black leadership)
Black abolitionists — free and formerly enslaved Black Americans who fought to end slavery as writers, speakers, organizers, and editors, and who were among the movement's leading voices. (first used: 3. Hear the abolitionists: immediate abolition and Black leadership)
Walker's Appeal — the pamphlet David Walker, a free Black man in Boston, published in 1829 urging Black Americans to resist slavery and racism. (first used: 3. Hear the abolitionists: immediate abolition and Black leadership)
The Liberator — the antislavery newspaper William Lloyd Garrison began publishing in Boston in 1831, which called for the immediate abolition of slavery. (first used: 3. Hear the abolitionists: immediate abolition and Black leadership)
Dictated narrative — a life story told aloud by one person, the teller, and written down by another, the writer, so that a careful reader names both and asks whose words are on the page. (first used: 4. Source a dictated narrative: Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert)
Teller — the person whose life a dictated narrative tells and who spoke it aloud; in The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, the teller is Sojourner Truth. (first used: 4. Source a dictated narrative: Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert)
Writer — the person who set a dictated narrative down on paper and chose its words; in The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, the writer is Olive Gilbert. (first used: 4. Source a dictated narrative: Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert)
The Narrative of Sojourner Truth — the dictated narrative of 1850 in which Sojourner Truth told her life and Olive Gilbert wrote it down, including her years in slavery in New York and the promise of freedom her enslaver broke. (first used: 4. Source a dictated narrative: Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert)
Free papers — a written document that recorded a person's legal freedom, which a formerly enslaved person could show to prove they were free. (first used: 5. Keep two dates apart: the promise and the State)
Women's rights movement — the movement that began in the 1840s to win women equal rights in law, property, wages, schooling, marriage, the church, and voting. (first used: 6. Read Seneca Falls: the Declaration of Sentiments)
World Anti-Slavery Convention — the international antislavery meeting held in London in 1840 that refused to seat women delegates, where Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met. (first used: 6. Read Seneca Falls: the Declaration of Sentiments)
Seneca Falls Convention — the first women's rights convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, where about 300 people attended and 100 signed the Declaration of Sentiments. (first used: 6. Read Seneca Falls: the Declaration of Sentiments)
Declaration of Sentiments — the statement adopted at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, that listed women's grievances and demanded equal rights, the vote among them. (first used: 6. Read Seneca Falls: the Declaration of Sentiments)
Elective franchise — the right to vote in elections, the term the Declaration of Sentiments used when it listed the vote among the rights denied to women. (first used: 6. Read Seneca Falls: the Declaration of Sentiments)

Summary

The Second Great Awakening was a wave of revivals from about 1800; the course reads its beliefs as history.
Camp meetings began in the Kentucky revivals; Black Methodists formed the AME Church in 1816.
Benevolent societies fed temperance, common schools, and asylum reform.
Dorothea Dix's memorial of 1843 pressed Massachusetts to care for people with mental illness.
Immediate abolition grew in the 1830s; Black abolitionists such as Walker and Stewart led it.
Abolitionism stayed a minority movement in the North.
The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) was told by Truth and written by Olive Gilbert.
The narrative's 1827 dates a broken promise; its 1828 dates the State's action; another source disagrees.
The Declaration of Sentiments (1848) copied the Declaration of Independence and asked for far more than the vote.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

An illustrative newspaper prints a retired lighthouse keeper's life story in 1912, as she told it to a reporter. It says she was born between 1844 and 1848. How wide is the range, and how old could she have been in 1912?
In that same story, the reporter writes that she remembers the storm as if it were yesterday. Name the teller and the writer, and say what the word she tells you.
A classmate's slide says the Seneca Falls Convention wanted only the vote. Correct the slide in two sentences.
Sort each illustrative item as primary or secondary for a question about revivals in the 1830s: (a) a hymn book printed in 1837 for use at revival meetings; (b) a documentary film made in 1994 about camp meetings.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

The range is 1848 − 1844 = 4 years wide. In 1912 she was at least 1912 − 1848 = 64 and at most 1912 − 1844 = 68 years old. A range in a told story is the teller's best estimate, so you keep the range rather than picking one year.
The teller is the lighthouse keeper; the writer is the reporter. The word she shows the reporter's voice: the sentence speaks about the teller, so its wording is the reporter's, as Gilbert's is in Truth's narrative.
The Declaration of Sentiments did demand the vote, but it also listed property, wages, divorce, schooling, and the church. The slide should say the convention demanded equal rights in many areas, the vote among them.
(a) The hymn book is primary: it was made in the 1830s for the meetings themselves. (b) The documentary is secondary: it was made much later to interpret them. Who made a source, and when, decides it.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Next week the same close-reading method meets a declaration of independence written in Texas, and asks what its grievances leave out.

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