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Pennsylvania Quakers
William Penn, a Quaker, founded Pennsylvania in 1681 in what was known as "Penn's Holy Experiment." The Quakers were a peaceful religious group of dissenters from England. They believed in taking no oaths, refused military service, and were accepting of the Native Americans. -
John Locke
Locke was a philosopher and political theorist during the 17th century. His ideas about government and human nature were important to the Early Enlightenment period and, consequently, the American Revolution. -
Salem Witch Trials
Fitting in and conforming was very important to the Puritans and their religion. Another Puritan belief was the belief of the Devil and when people thought witches were working with the Devil, the citizens of Salem were terrified and supported the trials. -
Enlightenment
Enlightenment ideas and philosophy inspired many American political thinkers to emphasize individual talent over hereditary privilege, while religion strengthened Americans' view of themselves as a people blessed with liberty. -
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1st Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening was a period when spirituality and religious devotion were revived. This feeling swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and 1770s. The revival of Protestant beliefs was part of a much broader movement that was taking place in England, Scotland, and Germany at that time. -
Halfway Covenant
Through the Halfway Covenant, second-generation Puritans could become halfway church members in order to baptize their children. Though the covenant softened the rigid guidelines of church admission, over time, it led to large-scale baptism and a maintenance of church membership. -
Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac
The general purpose of Poor Richard's Almanack was to provide affordable information to common people. Ben Franklin sought to improve the colonies' morality, monetary status, and virtue. His almanack provided a way to circulate those ideas, values, advice, etc. for a more educated populace. -
Common Sense
Common Sense made a clear case for independence and directly attacked the political, economic, and ideological obstacles to achieving it. Paine relentlessly insisted that British rule was responsible for nearly every problem in colonial society and that the 1770s crisis could only be resolved by colonial independence. -
Declaration of Independence
By issuing the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the 13 American colonies severed their political connections to Great Britain. The Declaration summarized the colonists' motivations for seeking independence. -
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Second Great Awakening
The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant religious revival during the late 18th to early 19th century in the United States. It spread religion through revivals and emotional preaching and sparked a number of reform movements. Started the idea that people could change themselves and what's around them; universal salvation -
Jefferson Separation of Church and State
President Thomas Jefferson, writing to members of the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut on this day in 1802, stated that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution created a “wall of separation between church and state. -
American Temperance
Temperance. The American Temperance Society was established in 1826 to combat the drinking problems of men. It called for total abstinence from alcohol, and the effects showed the success of this movement. Within two decades, the consumption of alcohol dropped by more than half. -
Church of Latter-Day Saints + Mormons
Joseph Smith Jr. established the Mormon Church, also known as The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (LDS), on April 6, 1830, in Seneca County, New York. In 1831, Smith and his followers moved to Kirtland, Ohio and began constructing a church by 1833. -
Garrison’s The Liberator
Edited by the fiery activist William Lloyd Garrison, this weekly Boston-based periodical served as a major platform to attack slavery and its supporters, inspire action, and promote equal rights for all. -
Transcendentalism
Emerson declared that the Transcendentalist "believes in miracles, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to the new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration and ecstasy." In July 1838, Emerson was invited to address the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School. -
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe shared ideas about the injustices of slavery, pushing back against dominant cultural beliefs about the physical and emotional capacities of black people. Reached the worldwide scale. -
Horatio Alger
Horatio Alger. Horatio Alger, Jr. was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security. -
Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth
This belief became known as the Gospel of Wealth. He argued that the affluent had a unique responsibility to be philanthropic. In other words, the rich should devote themselves to distributing their wealth responsibly to benefit society while they are still alive. -
Yellow Journalism
Yellow journalism was a style of newspaper reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts. During its heyday in the late 19th century it was one of many factors that helped push the United States and Spain into war in Cuba and the Philippines, leading to the acquisition of overseas territory by the United States. -
Ragtime and the Blues
Ragtime ushered in an urban dance craze. Like Coney Island amusements, ragtime and blues helped forge new collective experiences in a world of strangers. Like other mass commercial amusements, ragtime dance music lacked educational or "uplifting" content; its purpose was sheer pleasure. -
Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company
Tarbell's study of Standard Oil excoriated Rockefeller and his company and helped spur new legislation and litigation to regulate interstate commerce and counter monopoly. -
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
The most famous, influential, and enduring of all muckraking novels, The Jungle was an exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards. Because of the public response, the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, and conditions in American slaughterhouses were improved. -
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Jazz
Jazz played a significant part in wider cultural changes during the period, and its influence on pop culture continued long afterwards. Jazz music originated mainly in New Orleans, and is/was a fusion of African and European music. -
Scopes Monkey Trial
The Scopes trial, formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case from July 10 to July 21, 1925, in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. Scopes was found guilty and was fined, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. -
Rock and Pop
It made an important impact on America and the world by inspiring and contributing to social and cultural change. Rock signified rebellion and young people's rejection of their parents' music, attitudes, and expectations. It also offered a bridge between races, classes, religions, and cultures. -
Silent Spring
The most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. Carson had made a radical proposal: that, at times, technological progress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed. -
Civil Rights Act
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees and job applicants from discrimination based on religion. Title VII also requires employers to reasonably accommodate the religious practices of an employee or prospective employee, unless doing so would create an “undue hardship” on the employer.