Week 10 — Reform, Religion & Reawakening

Why this matters

Whether you are a nursing or social-work student asking how a society should care for people with mental illness, a future teacher in a free public school, or someone who has organized a petition or a campus campaign, this week's question of how ordinary people banded together to change their country is one you will meet again.

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.

• Already covered: Week 1's four moves for reading a source, Week 3's oral account, Week 5's Declaration of Independence, and Week 9's Jacksonian democracy.
• This week: the Second Great Awakening, temperance, common schools, asylum reform, immediate abolition, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, and the Seneca Falls Convention.
• How they connect: as the vote widened for white men, you ask who was left out and what they did.
• Where we're going next: Week 11, Manifest Destiny & Expansion.

Focus

How did a wave of religious revivals, and the reform movements it fed, change the country between the 1820s and 1850, and whose voices led them?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] 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 immediate abolition and show that Seneca Falls asked for more than the vote

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 10 (~55–65 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes).
3. Work the practice set (15–25 minutes).
4. Do the Primary Source Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
5. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: when a life story reaches you, ask who spoke and who held the pen.

You've got this

Take the narrative one step at a time, and ask if a step snags.

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