1. US history survey
April 3, 2012
Social change & social reform
1830s – 1850s

2. ****suggestions for studying****
• review
– Power Point slide shows
– your own notes
– readings
• create a study group – talking with other
students is a very useful way to prepare for
exams.
• think about what the big picture is.
• what are most important details?
• look at maps!

3. announcements
• midterm exam, Tuesday, April 17 – covers
everything this semester –
reading, lectures, discussions, slides.
• Class picnic in park (after midterms)?
• If you want to talk with me, please make an
appointment (in person or by email), so I will
be in my office.

4. social changes
• immigration
• reform movements
– abolitionism
– women’s rights
– temperance (in use of alcohol)
• labor movements – improve
wages, hours, conditions of workers

5. immigration – Irish and Germans
• 2 largest groups today of self-identified
descendants of European immigrants.

6. Irish potato famine – 1 million
died, 1845 - 1852

7. departing for America

8. • 2 million Irish
immigrated to US, 1820
– 1860, most during/
after potato famine.
• Memorial to Irish • also labor recruitment.
famine, 1845 – • only major immigrant
1852, Dublin. group that was more
than 50% women.

9. life in US
• mostly remained in cities; couldn’t afford to
become farmers in west.
• Boston & New York major Irish communities.
• competed with free people of color for
jobs, especially as laborers & domestic
workers.
• hostility, anti-Irish, & anti-Catholic attitudes &
actions in US.
• stereotyped as violent, alcoholic, dominated
by Catholic priests & political bosses.

12. German immigrants
• typically small farmers & artisans dislodged by
industrialization & commercialization of
agriculture. Not as poor as Irish.
• also people who immigrated because of 1848
revolutions in Europe.
• included intellectuals.
• included some German Jews.
• greatest numbers in 1850s.

13. German immigrants mid-19th c went to
midwest & Texas farms & newer cities.

16. 1837 Boston newspaper
“Our foreign population are too much in the
habit of retaining their own nations usages, of
associating too exclusively with each other, &
living in groups together. It would be the best
part of wisdom, to abandon at once all usages
and associations which mark them as
foreigners, and to become in feeling &
custom, as well as in privileges & rights, citizens
of the US.”

17. moral & social reform
• abolition of slavery.
– American Colonization Society, 1817 – return to Africa.
– did not mean social equality to most white abolitionists.
– at least 50 Black abolitionist societies in N by 1830.
• women’s rights.
• evangelical religion – underlay reforms ideologically &
in tactics.
– anti-Catholicism.
• Americans founded more voluntary organizations than
anywhere else in world (de Tocqueville).

18. Grimke sisters: Angelina & Sarah
• left South Carolina because of slavery.
• became Quakers & abolitionists in Penn.
• Angelina married Theodore Dwight
Weld, abolitionist.

19. Grimke home, Charleston, SC

20. Charleston, South Carolina home of
Grimke relatives

21. Pastoral Letter of the General Assoc. of
Massachusetts to the Congregational
Churches under Their Care (1837)
• Strongly criticized
women for daring to
speak in public –
although these were
ministers who were also
abolitionists!

22. Philadelphia abolitionists, 1840s

23. William Lloyd
Garrison
• Liberator, 1831 – 1865, Boston journalist.
• immediate emancipation, non-violent
resistance, social equality.
• American Anti-Slavery Society, which included
women, 1833.

24. anti-abolitionist mobs

25. Sojourner Truth

26. S. Truth statue
• Florence Massachusetts
• erected 2002
• S.T. lived in Florence in
1850s

27. ST’s home in Florence (today)

28. Seneca Falls, New York

29. 1st women’s rights
convention

30. leaders at Seneca Falls convention
Frederick Douglass
Lucretia Mott
Elizabeth Cady Stanton

31. connections between movements for
social change
• Stanton & Mott met at London World Anti-Slavery
convention, 1840, & agreed on the need for a women’s
rights convention.
• organizers at Seneca Falls included members of
Underground Railroad.
• Frederick Douglass led the convention to approve
controversial resolution for women’s suffrage.
• compare avenues of change open to enslaved persons.

33. Seneca Falls Declaration of
Sentiments, 1848
• “The history of mankind is a history of
repeated injuries and usurpations on the part
of man toward woman, having in direct object
the establishment of an absolute tyranny over
her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a
candid world.”
• Note language! Where have you heard this
before?

34. Note that women & men
attended, debated, and
supported the Declaration
of Sentiments.

35. “injuries & usurpations”
• “He has never permitted her to exercise her
inalienable right to the elective franchise.”
• “He has compelled her to submit to laws, in
the formation of which she had no voice.”
• “He has made her, if married, in the eye of the
law, civilly dead.”
• “He has taken from her all right in
property, even to the wages she earns.”

36. double standards
• “He has created a false public sentiment by
giving to the world a different code of morals
for men and women, by which moral
delinquencies, which exclude women from
society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of
little account in man.”

37. rights of citizens
“Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of
one-half the people of this country, their social
and religious degradation--in view of the unjust
laws above mentioned, and because women do
feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and
fraudulently deprived of their most sacred
rights, we insist that they have immediate
admission to all the rights and privileges which
belong to them as citizens of the United States.”

38. Trayvon Martin
• Florida has “Stand Your
Ground” gun law.
• History: Black men
murdered with impunity.
• “racial profiling.”
• Obama: “if I had a son, he’d
• unarmed, 17-y-o student. look like Trayvon Martin.”
• murdered in Feb. by self- • protests for justice all over
appointed neighborhood US.
watch guy, 28-y-o Anglo/
Latino, George
Zimmerman, who claims

39. announcements
• midterm exam, Tuesday, April 17 – covers
everything this semester –
reading, lectures, discussions, slides.
• Class picnic in park (after midterms)?
• If you want to talk with me, please make an
appointment (in person or by email), so I will
be in my office.