Jackson+and+the+Era+of+Reform

**Jackson and the Era of Reform**  toc

= = =The Jacksonian Era and the Era of Reform = [Contributed by Matthew Watson] 

Background
  // Context // : Second Semester of year-long course “U.S. History I” taught to ninth-grade students at Excel High School at the South Boston Education Complex // Units 1 & 3 // : “Jackson and the Growth of Democracy” (9 days) “The Era of Reform” (10 days) // Classes // : Period 4 – Ninth Grade, Inclusion, 29 students (55 minutes per day) Period 6 – Ninth Grade, Inclusion, 25 students (55 minutes per day) // Limitations // : No laptop cart or reliably available computer lab; students’ use of websites limited to projected image of teacher’s computer screen; classroom is very small and shared with a math class, both of which allow for little flexibility in seating arrangements (jigsaws, stations, groups larger than two or three are problematic). 

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Resources
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">The Textbook
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> 1) Hart, Diane, et al., eds. //History Alive! The United States//. Palo Alto: Teachers’ Curriculum Institute, 2002. ♦This is the official course textbook. It is heavily illustrated and “sectionalized,” and, from my experience, easily readable and digestible for most of my ninth-grade students. My mentor teacher relies on it as the students’ primary source of information and has trained students to access it by taking a modified form of Cornell Notes. I intend to follow in the practice, but to hopefully shift the textbook into functioning as a repository of basic information that will serve as a backdrop to more in-depth studies. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Background Sources for Teacher
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">2) Davidson, James West, et al., eds. //Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, Volume I: To 1877//. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2001. Nation of Nations is college-level textbook that attempts to maintain narrative momentum while still engaging the “sub-headings” of American History in some detail. It also emphasizes up-to-date (in 2001) engagement with recent scholarly developments. In my preparation it will function primarily as fuller treatment to nuance the broad- strokes history of the courses primary textbook. Teachers who feel that they are learning U.S. history as they go will benefit from this text’s concentrated focus through Reconstruction as well as its ease of reading. The updated 2005 edition is available on Amazon.com from $8.00 for used copies.

3) Durkheim, Emile. //The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life//. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. New York: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1915. I included Durkheim here because I feel that the public school teacher needs to establish some working-theory that will inform the way he or she presents and speaks about what is essentially a religious history. “There are just some things we can’t explain…” is just as useless an explanation as “God did it.” The social sciences offer many working-theories and models (see Weber below) that attempt to describe and, to a certain extent, explain religious phenomena without trespassing into the metaphysics of the matter. Durkheim’s notion of “collective effervescence” (II.7.iii) is one such attempt that I think is particularly helpful when talking about the orgiastic, distinction- destroying revivalism of the Second Great Awakening, the spirit of which was mediated through participatory oratory, anxious meetings, and sunrise prayer groups. Similarly, for Durkheim, when concentrated in religious ceremony and “in certain determined moments, the collective life has been able to attain its greatest intensity and efficacy, and consequently to give men a more active sentiment of the double existence they lead and the double nature in which they participate.” In ceremonial events of religious culture, the sociologist observes, the individual can be transported beyond his day-to-day sense of himself into something larger, grander, and intensely motivating. Oxford World’s Classics edition is available new for $10.17 on Amazon.com.

4) Hofstadter, Richard. //The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It//. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1948.

Not only is Hofstadter’s first major work a classic in political portraiture, but it offers the busy teacher brief counterpoints on a variety of often caricatured political figures. Hofstadter’s portraits achieve their unique insight by identifying or juxtaposing their subject with novel themes in the wider American experience. Chapters relevant to units 1 and 3 include “Andrew Jackson and the Rise of Liberal Capitalism,” “John C. Calhoun: The Marx of the Master Class,” and “Wendell Phillips: The Patrician as Agitator.” I feel that, whatever realignment social history has achieved in the past several decades, there are, for teachers and students alike, simply some historical characters worth dwelling on and coming to know in some depth. Used copies available on Amazon.com from $0.13 and from $10.85 new.

5) _. //Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.// New York: Random House, 1962. Hofstadter’s survey of American anti-intellectualism, although it reaches at one extreme into the 1950s, begins with the evangelicalism, politics, and reform culture of the early- to mid-nineteenth century. I tend to follow Hofstadter’s lead in identifying the peculiar antipathy toward learning and the corresponding veneration of the emotional life that originated roughly in the Second Great Awakening and specifically in the work of Charles Finney as a first order factor in the emergence of the popular politics, public discourse, and proclivity for association that typified the antebellum years. The revivalism of roughly 1815 through the mid-1830s—when Charles Finney departed the revival circuit for Oberlin College—took an already healthy strain of American iconoclasm to its extreme. Any treatment of the central themes of “Jacksonian America” is incomplete without reference to this influence. Available new for $12.21 at Amazon.com.

6) Howe, Daniel Walker. //What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848//. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

The narrative of this recent Pulitzer Prize-winning historical synthesis treats the central years of the second half of U.S. History I’s scope, from the end of the Battle of New Orleans through the United States’ victory over Mexico (1815-1848 out of roughly from 1800-1877). Howe portrays these years as an era of expansion—territorially, industrially, of the technologies of transport and communication, and of the power of political parties. Although Howe attempts and achieves narrative momentum across his 904 pages (bibliographical essay, index), each chapter stands alone as a discrete topical study. Thus Jackson’s presidency and the issues surrounding it, the Second Great Awakening, and the reform movement are each the focus of multiple chapters. Additionally, Walker’s footnotes are a commentary on the books that have proved themselves historiographically significant over the past 20 years and suggest avenues of inquiry into more micro studies of the topics he takes up. What Hath God Wrought is available new from Amazon.com for $23.10.

7) Weber, Max. //The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.// Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Routledge, 1992 (1930, first English Edition by Allen and Unwin). Religion is not all ephemeral stuff; according to Weber it can pay. There are two uses for Weber’s most popular work in the second half of U.S. History I: First, and most obviously, the Early Republic and Antebellum years were a time when the U.S., particularly the North, grew simultaneously very rich and very religious. As the story goes, colonial and early America tended to be populated by the more ascetically- oriented—and less jolly—branches of Protestantism. For these groups, happiness would only be obtainable in heaven and “[w]aste of time [was the] first and in principle deadliest of sins” (104). This, along with the “importance of a fixed calling” provided “an ethical justification of the modern specialized division of labor” and made the United State’s economic growth inevitable (109). Weber’s classic formulation has been surpassed but still stands as a powerful and relatively accessible model for understanding America’s ardent religiosity in connection with its wider social and economic trends. Second, and less well known, Weber’s characterizations of the ethical and emotional tendencies of each major branch of Protestantism are pithy, insightful, and, from my perspective, accurate (see esp. chs. 4 and 5 for this). Such portraits, like Hofstadter’s of politicians, are always useful to the teacher struggling to enflesh a collection of loose biographical facts. The Talcott translation, which I believe is still the standard, can be had in a Dover Value Edition for $5.00 on Amazon.com. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Classroom Sources
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> 8) “Andrew Jackson” (Lesson Plans and Primary Resources) at USHistorySite.com

♦ Accessible at http://ushistorysite.com/andrew_jackson.php ♦ The website is divided into two sections “Lesson Plans” and “Primary Sources.” The primary sources section has only two documents, but there are links to dozens of primary sources (though some do not work) from the various lesson plans. These hyperlinked lesson plans are the golden geese of this website. ♦ Website maintained in the service of high school American history teachers. Organization is a little obtuse, but manageable. Site offers a variety of sources, all of which seem keyed to the high school mind. Site will serve well the history teacher’s two perennial interests: teaching students to analyze primary sources and to synthesize information from multiple sources. ♦ There are three lesson plans on this website which I plan to borrow from: “The 1828 Campaign of Andrew Jackson: Expansion of the Voting Base,” “The 1828 Campaign of Andrew Jackson and the Growth of Party Politics,” and “The 1828 Campaign of Andrew Jackson: Territorial Expansion and the Shift of Power.” Although the lesson plans are, in my opinion, disorganized and do not display the purposefulness articulated in their titles, they are replete with links to other Jackson primary written and visual sources, short biographies, historical voter participation statistics and corresponding maps, a potentially classroom-ready short essay on Andrew Jackson’s “Old Hickory” image, as well as a PDF digest of amendments to the federal and states constitutions regarding voting rights leading up to the 1828 election. ♦ The strength of the site is its links, particularly its links to visual primary sources. Newspaper articles in their original typeset instead of transcriptions, charts of voting statistics, color coded historical election and territorial expansion maps, and relevant Harper’s Weekly cartoons. For the teacher willing to dig a little, this site promises some modest finds. No homeruns, though.

9) “Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil, & the Presidency” at PBS.org ♦ Accessible at http://www.pbs.org/kcet/andrewjackson/edu. Menus are easily navigated. Colorful, classy presentation. ♦ This website merits a solid bit of browsing. Its focus on Andrew Jackson does not constrict its scope, but lends focus to its breadth. The soul of this website is a two-hour documentary film narrated by Martin Sheen. The film is divided into chronological and thematic chapters with titles like “Wild Young Man,” “War Hero,” and “First Modern President.” These divisions are, in turn, further subdivided. The chapter “First Modern Hero,” for instance, is subdivided into “First Days in Office” and “The Eton Affair.” The former segment is 3 minutes 15 seconds long and shows actors frolicking in the White House, the latter, 4 minutes 38 seconds long and tastefully but provocatively treats the amorous political episode. Each segment is also accompanied by three “related links.” For “The Eaton Affair” segment one the links connects to a page that discusses “The Power of Women” in nineteenth-century America. ♦ Useful for teaching students how to take notes on a film and interpret what a documentary is trying to convey through its narration, images, and use of commentators. ♦ The PBS documentary reproduced in usefully divided segments on this website is perfect supplement (and in some cases, substitute) to the background information provided by the textbook. If I can skip a section of the text by showing a segment of the documentary, I consider it a good trade. ♦ The documentary on which this website is based passes the “school test” for such films. That test has but one standard, and asks but one question: are there actors. The answer in this case is yes. It is nearly cinematic in the telling of its narrative. Visual learners and movie-goers alike will appreciate this complex, but entertaining treatment of Jackson.

10) Douglass, Frederick. //Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass//. Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. ♦ Unabridged Narrative accessible at the Berkeley Digital Library at http://sunsite3. berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/ ♦ Eleven chapters, not including instructive prefaces by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. The Dover Thrift Edition is 100 pages. ♦ As with any of the primary sources of this era, Douglass’s Narrative forces students to contend with mid-nineteenth century prose, but mollifies this demand through the engaging style of Douglass’s storytelling. The Narrative offers many one- or two- paragraph asides that make for wonderful primary source excerpts for use in a jigsaw or similar activity. For instance, there is a paragraph at the end of Chapter III in which Douglass discusses the reasons why so many slaves claimed to be content with their lot in life (masters were know to employ spies—both black and white—to ascertain the morale of their slaves). It is a short excerpt that could be combined with several others to help students appreciate the tensions involved in slave life, or perhaps as part of an attempt to answer the question: Why didn’t the slaves just run away? ♦ In my third unit, which deals with the Era of Reform, many portions of the Narrative could prove useful in establishing the context in which the abolitionist movement unfolded. In the eleventh chapter, for example, there is a surprising passage in which Douglass criticizes the Underground Railroad and its operatives as, to translate, too cocky. This passage could serve as an engaging avenue whereby to approach the division over means which characterized the abolition movement. ♦ The playfulness and action-orientation of Douglass’s writing will undoubtedly make the Narrative engaging primary source reading (compared to alternatives) for most students.

11)Douglass, Frederick. “Independence Day Speech” at Rochester, NY (July 5, 1852). ♦ Accessible at TeachingAmericanHistory.org: http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/ library/index.asp?document=462 ♦ A fourteen-paragraph speech. First-rate irony in plain language. For those in Massachusetts, it is also among the “Seminal Primary Documents to Read.” (Although I find its listing under the “Economic Growth in the North and South,1800-1860” section of the standards a little puzzling. I think it would wear better under “Social, Political, and Religious Change, 1800-1860.” As for me, I plan to use it in my Era of Reform unit.) ♦ Douglass’s speech is a pedagogical bonanza in its connections back to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, as a primer in irony and public speaking generally, and at the same time as a foreshadowing of John Brown’s weariness of mere talk (“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”) I think there is a wonderful bit of room here to talk about what may be the primary fault of democracy: indecisiveness. That a nation can carry on for decades bearing the tension of two irreconcilable positions in its being and be said to possess an “enlightened” form of government is not an obvious proposition. ♦ I will probably use this speech to highlight Douglass’s career as an African-American abolitionist and to discuss how a society’s conscience is rarely located within its governmental structure. This latter aim is of a piece with what I hope to illustrate through engagement with the Antebellum reformers. ♦ Any student interested in writing, speaking, rapping, sermonizing, Obama, or drama should be drawn to this piece. It cries to be read aloud. It embodies the ironical distance between America’s founding ideals and the racism, slavery, and compromise that had characterized its treatment of blacks since its founding.

12) Finney, Charles G. Sermons on Important Subjects. New York: John S. Taylor, 1836. ♦ Accessible in digital form at http://www.gospeltruth.net/1836SOIS/indexsois.htm ♦ A selection of twelve of Finney’s popular early sermons. Sermons like “How to Change Your Heart,” “The Traditions of the Elders,” and “Why Sinners Hate God” gives us insight into the ideas and type of preaching that were so influential in the early and mid-nineteenth century. ♦ For a variety of reasons, the interpretation of a sermon requires a different analytical approach than, say, a political speech and requires separate training (i.e. while it is the strategy of good political oratory to engender in its hearers a sense of well-being, solidity, and virtue that they had not felt before, a good nineteenth-century evangelical sermon made its hearers aware of previously undetected sins, depravities, and impending punishments). Sermons also typically derive more explicitly from particular doctrines than do political speeches. In any event, the sermon merits particular attention as a distinct form of American communication culture and students should learn to analyze it as such. ♦ I am planning to use one particular sermon, “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts,” to introduce students to the Christian theological concept of regeneration and to explain the alteration that concept underwent in the Second Great Awakening. In order to make the sermon more accessible to my students and to focus on the portions of it that serve my purposes, I have created an abridged and edited version of the sermon. ♦ Students interested in theology, philosophy, religious development and culture, and oratory will be engaged by a close study of Finney’s sermons.

13) Miller, Perry, ed. //The Transcendentalists: An Anthology//. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950. ♦ Miller’s anthology is out of print, though readily available in any academic library or on Amazon.com. ♦ Annotated excerpts (107 total) from well-known and less well-known American Transcendentalists, including forerunners (Sampson Reed), stalwarts (Emerson, Thoreau), and peripheral figures (Orestes A. Brownson). 521 pages, bibliography and index. ♦ The wide selection of usually short and always well-annotated excerpts are useful for exercises in context building, textual analysis, synthesis of multiple sources, and nuancing the typical presentation of Transcendentalists. ♦ I had originally hoped to do more with the Transcendentalists that it now looks like I will have time for. For anything more than a cursory treatment I would almost certainly turn to Miller’s anthology to demonstrate how Transcendentalism was a part of a wider American Romanticism. ♦ Will be appreciated by students interest in philosophy, writing, or intellectual history.

14) “The Second Great Awakening and the Age of Reform” at TeachUSHistory.org ♦ Accessible at http://www.teachushistory.org/second-great-awakening-age-reform ♦ The website is divided into four sections: Overview, approaches, articles, and resources. All are useful. I think the “approaches” section is especially helpful. It lives up to its billing and suggests approaches to the Second Great Awakening from a variety of quarters. Each of its seven angles of approach consists of a link to a series of annotated resources. These include: “The Revival Experience,” “The Revival and Anti- Slavery,” “Dorothea Dix: Unitarian Reform,” and “Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.” ♦ The summaries and brief introductory essays that populate this site are ideal for the teacher seeking to fill out his or her background knowledge of the Second Great Awakening, as well as for students to get a more nuanced and detailed treatment of the revival than is typically available in secondary textbooks. But most importantly, any teacher with a bent toward attempting an historical “signature pedagogy” instruction will appreciate the wealth of primary sources available on this site. ♦ I think the selection of converts’ stories from—get ready—The Testimony of a Hundred Witnesses; or, The Instrumentalities by Which Sinners are Brought to Embrace the Religion of Jesus Christ from Christians of Different Denominations (1858) would make a wonderful introduction to the types of soul-concerns that haunted many nineteenth-century Americans and how they found their resolution in “conversion to Christ.” The same section also contains links to Finney’s description of the 1830 Rochester revival and of his own conversion as a young lawyer. The narrative of anxious sinner/the power of preaching/joy in Christ was a central narrative in the nineteenth- century mind and is worth exploring. ♦ Students interested in religion, authentic experience, oratory, or mass movements will connect to with the materials offered by this site.

15) Thoreau, Henry David. //Walden; Or, Life in the Woods//. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.

♦ Walden and other Thoreau sources are available online at The Walden Woods Project, under the “Research” menu on the left side of the Project’s homepage. The text itself is accessible at http://www.walden.org/Institute/thoreau/writings/walden/Walden.htm ♦ Walden is a difficult book. It requires dedication and patience of even the purposeful adult reader. That being said, it also possesses passages of universal appeal. Chosen wisely and linked in students’ minds to a clear purpose, Walden can prove a rewarding source. ♦ Thoreau’s greatest work can be used as a commentary on many of the important themes of nineteenth-century American life: transcendentalism, war, slavery, the market economy, social reform, etc. ♦ There are several passages, particularly in Chapter II “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” that I think will offer an eloquent dissent from the religious- and organization- oriented reforms of the antebellum era. ♦ Students who find the majority of class too facile for the depth of their adolescent experience and feeling may connect to Thoreau the philosophical hermit, and perhaps even to Thoreau the poetically-tempered local traveler.

16) Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman?” Speech; delivered in May 1851 at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. ♦ Frances G. Gage’s original (though retrospective) transcription available at Fordham’s Modern History Sourcebook at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/sojtruth2.html, but I would suggest the modern-language version that appears in Wikipedia’s treatment of the speech at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain%27t_I_a_Woman%3F (you may recall that Truth’s first language was Dutch, and unfortunately Gage was quite taken with this detail). ♦ This is a short, visceral speech. In its modern-English rendering it should take about two minutes to read, silently or out loud. ♦ “Ain’t I a Woman?” is pedagogically useful on two counts. First, it is an excellent example of rhetorical humility in the tradition of Socrates and Shakespeare’s Mark Antony (in Julius Ceasar). Truth was tall and strong and sometimes confused for a man. Yet in this speech she appropriates the rhetoric of womanly meekness to great effect. I like to take every possible opportunity to put before students examples of effective writing and speaking. ♦ The second use of this piece is as a window into the internal tensions of the women’s movement. Often led by men, often excluding African Americans, the women’s movement was not progressive in the purest sense. And yet this fact only indicates that similar aggregate of motives and assumptions comprised all nineteenth-century—and perhaps all modern—reform movements. ♦ Truth’s speech offers students a vibrant woman’s voice in an era whose public life was dominated by male words. Truth is also a colorful and engaging figure. Her personal travels, exploits, and friendships alone could supply the basis for several college courses. Also, students will most likely relate with her raw physicality and volubility.

17) Whittier, John Greenleaf. “Clerical Oppressors” (1836) ♦ “Poems by John Greenleaf Whittier” on Read Book Online. A wide selection of poems, most annotated, arranged alphabetically and by subject. Accessible at http://www.readbookonline.net/books/Whittier/141/#Poem ♦ “Clerical Oppressors” is a short, twelve-stanza poem excoriating the South’s pastors and priests for lending their religious authority to the pro-slavery political stance of the southern states. The poem does contain some archaic language and difficult vocabulary (addressed in my attached annotation of the poem), but overall very readable. ♦ In the same vein as my above comments on the pedagogical utility of Finney’s sermon, I believe that reading a poem as an historical artifact is a special skill separate from simple historical interpretation and not likely to be covered in language arts courses. The poem offers an occasion to work through some of the thinking involved in such interpretation. ♦ In addition, I plan to use “Clerical Oppressors” to complicate the notion—which I will on other occasions expressly advance—that evangelical religion was the basis for much of the North’s antebellum culture of moral reform. It is important to note that nearly identical religious views were made to undergird the intellectual defense of slavery in the South. ♦ Poetry humanizes history. Any time it can be brought to bear it will (hopefully) enliven students’ interest in, deepen their empathy with, and make more memorable their study of a given topic.