AP United States History

## Learning Outcomes

- Understand how a distinct American culture developed between **1800** and **1848**
- Identify the role of the **Second Great Awakening** in shaping religion and reform
- Recall important writers, artists, and thinkers who helped define national culture
- Explain how women and African Americans contributed to cultural change
- Distinguish between national culture and national identity
- Use specific evidence in SAQ, LEQ, and DBQ responses on Period 4 culture

## AP United States History Syllabus

For the AP United States History, you are expected to understand how a new national culture emerged in **Period 4 (1800–1848)**, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

- Know that a distinct American culture developed through **literature, art, religion, reform, and language**
- Identify the impact of the **Second Great Awakening** on church growth and social reform
- Explain how **Romanticism** and **influenceentalism** shaped American thought
- Understand how figures such as **Washington Irving**, **James Fenimore Cooper**, **Ralph Waldo Emerson**, and **Henry David Thoreau** reflected American themes
- Recognise the significance of the **Hudson River School**, **Noah Webster**, and **John James Audubon**
- Explain how reform movements such as **temperance**, **abolition**, **education reform**, and **women’s rights** expressed new cultural values
- Understand how women and African Americans shaped national culture through reform work, religion, and writing
- Distinguish between the growth of a shared national culture and the limits of that culture because of slavery, racism, and gender inequality

## Test Your Knowledge

_Attempt these questions before reading this article. If you find some difficult or cannot remember the answers, look more closely at that area during your revision._

1. How did the **Second Great Awakening** help create a new national culture?
2. What made writers such as **Washington Irving** and **James Fenimore Cooper** distinctively American?
3. How did **go beyondentalism** differ from revival religion?
4. Name two reform movements linked to cultural change in the **1820s–1840s**.
5. Why would it be inaccurate to say that the new national culture included all Americans equally?

## Introduction

Between **1800** and **1848**, the United States developed more than a stronger government and a larger economy. It also developed a more recognisably **American culture**. That culture appeared in religion, literature, painting, language, reform, and everyday public life. Americans increasingly defined themselves through ideas and images that were not simply borrowed from Britain.

For APUSH, this topic matters because it connects several major Period 4 themes at once: **American and National Identity (NAT)**, **American and Regional Culture (ARC)**, and **Social Structures (SOC)**. Strong answers explain not just that culture changed, but why it changed: the **Market Revolution** spread print and communication, democratization widened participation for white men, revival religion encouraged moral action, and reform movements pushed Americans to argue over what freedom should mean.

> **Key Term: national culture**
> The shared literature, art, religion, language, values, and public practices through which people in a nation define themselves.

### Religion and reform as foundations of national culture

One of the clearest signs of a new national culture was the spread of the **Second Great Awakening** in the early nineteenth century. This religious revival stressed emotional conversion, personal responsibility, and the belief that individuals could choose salvation. That message fit the tone of the age. In a society becoming more democratic for white men, religion also became less tied to old hierarchies and more open to ordinary people.

> **Key Term: Second Great Awakening**
> An early nineteenth-century Protestant revival movement that emphasised individual salvation, free will, and moral reform.

The revival was especially strong in western and central **New York**, the so-called **Burned-Over District**. Preachers such as **Charles Grandison Finney** held revival meetings that pushed hearers toward immediate conversion. This was different from older Calvinist views that stressed predestination. Finney’s approach implied that people could change themselves and, by extension, improve society.

That link is crucial. Revivalism did not stay inside churches. It moved outward into reform. If individuals were morally responsible, then society’s sins had to be confronted too. That cause-and-effect chain helps explain why so many reform movements flourished in the same decades.

> **Key Term: Burned-Over District**
> A region of western and central New York known for intense revivalism and reform activity in the early nineteenth century.

The **temperance movement** tried to reduce or ban alcohol. Reformers argued that drinking damaged families, wasted wages, and encouraged violence. The **common school movement**, led by **Horace Mann**, argued that tax-supported public education would produce informed citizens and moral discipline. **Dorothea Dix** pushed for better treatment of the mentally ill and for prison reform. These movements reflected a belief that America could be improved, not just governed.

Women played a major role in this reform culture. They were constrained by **republican motherhood** and the **cult of domesticity**, which said women should shape the home and moral life rather than public politics. Yet reform gave women an opening into public action. By organising meetings, signing petitions, and leading moral campaigns, women gained experience that later fed directly into the **women’s rights movement**.

> **Key Term: cult of domesticity**
> The belief that women’s proper sphere was the home, where they would uphold morality, family life, and domestic order.

The best example of that shift came in **1848** at the **Seneca Falls Convention**, organised by **Elizabeth Cady Stanton** and **Lucretia Mott**. Their **Declaration of Sentiments** copied the language of the Declaration of Independence to argue that women, like men, were entitled to equal rights. That shows how reform was also cultural. It reused national ideals and forced Americans to ask who counted in the nation.

African Americans also shaped this culture through independent institutions. In **1816**, **Richard Allen** founded the **African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church**, the first independent Black Protestant denomination in the United States. This was culturally important because it showed Black autonomy in religion rather than dependence on white-controlled churches.

Abolitionist writing and speaking also reshaped public debate. **William Lloyd Garrison’s** _The Liberator_ demanded immediate emancipation. **Frederick Douglass**, especially through his **1845** autobiography, turned lived experience into a powerful national critique of slavery. These voices did not just oppose slavery. They forced Americans to confront whether a nation claiming liberty could tolerate bondage.

> **Test Tip:** On an LEQ or SAQ, do not treat the Second Great Awakening as only a church movement. Show the chain: revivalism → moral responsibility → reform movements.

### Literature, language, and ideas become distinctly American

A new national culture also appeared in literature and language. Earlier American writing often imitated Europe. By the early nineteenth century, writers increasingly used American settings, characters, and problems.

**Washington Irving** was one of the first American authors to gain international recognition. In _The Sketch-Book_ (**1819–1820**), including **“Rip Van Winkle”** and **“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,”** he used American folklore and scenerys rather than copying British models. His work mattered because it helped prove that American subjects were worth serious literature.

**James Fenimore Cooper** did something similar through the frontier novel. In _The Last of the Mohicans_ (**1826**), he used the wilderness, Native American figures, and frontier conflict to define American experience. Cooper’s work helped build the idea that the frontier was central to the nation’s character: danger, independence, movement, and conflict with older worlds.

This was culture, not just entertainment. These works helped Americans imagine what kind of people they were. A nation of old aristocratic cities would produce one kind of literature. A nation of forests, settlers, and westward movement produced another.

Language itself also became part of cultural independence. **Noah Webster** promoted a distinct American English through spelling books and dictionaries. This may seem minor, but it mattered symbolically. Political independence from Britain had already been won; Webster’s work suggested cultural independence too.

> **Key Term: American Romanticism**
> A broad cultural movement that emphasised emotion, nature, individual feeling, and distinctly American settings and themes.

A more intellectual strand of this culture appeared in **go beyondentalism**. Figures such as **Ralph Waldo Emerson** and **Henry David Thoreau** argued that truth could be found through intuition, individual conscience, and nature rather than only through organised religion or inherited authority.

> **Key Term: Beyondentalism**
> A movement that stressed individualism, intuition, self-reliance, and the spiritual value of nature.

This is where students often get confused. The **Second Great Awakening** and **surpassentalism** both challenged cold rationalism, but they were not the same. Revival religion was evangelical, collective, and focused on conversion. surpass】【。entalism was more literary and philosophical, focused on inward truth and self-reliance.

Emerson’s ideas celebrated independent thought. Thoreau’s _Walden_ presented nature as a source of moral clarity, while his later defense of **civil disobedience** argued that conscience should outweigh unjust government action. These ideas influenced later reformers and gave American culture a strong tradition of moral individualism.

> **Test Tip:** A common error is to merge confuseentalism with the Second Great Awakening. Keep the distinction clear: revivalism was religious and evangelical; idealismentalism was intellectual and literary.

### Art, popular participation, and the limits of “national” culture

American culture was not only written and preached. It was painted and publicly performed. The **Hudson River School** became the first major school of distinctly American painting. Artists such as **Thomas Cole** celebrated dramatic scenerys, presenting nature as grand, spiritual, and national.

> **Key Term: Hudson River School**
> A movement of American scenic painters who celebrated the natural scenery of the United States and linked it to national identity.

The importance of this art was larger than aesthetics. European nations often rooted identity in ancient monarchy, cathedrals, or old cities. The United States could instead root identity in the natural world. Vast forests, rivers, and mountains became signs of national greatness. That fit neatly with expansion and pride after the **War of 1812**, when nationalism strengthened.

Other figures extended this cultural focus on the American environment. **John James Audubon** in _Birds of America_ catalogued the natural world in a way that suggested the United States possessed unique beauty and scientific interest. The nation’s environment became part of its self-image.

Culture also became more public through expanded participation. Growth in party politics, newspapers, rallies, and elections created a shared political culture, especially among white men. **Jacksonian democracy** widened voting rights for many white males and made politics louder and more popular. Campaigning, newspapers, public meetings, and parades all helped build national habits and symbols.

But students should be careful here. A national culture was emerging, yet it was not fully inclusive. Women were praised as moral guardians but denied political equality. African Americans built major religious and reform institutions, yet lived under racism and exclusion. Native Americans often appeared in literature and politics as symbols, while actual Native peoples were being displaced by expansion. Shared culture could unite, but it could also exclude.

That is why a strong APUSH answer should avoid saying the culture was simply “national” in a complete sense. It was national in aspiration and reach, but unequal in practice.

Minstrelsy and other forms of popular entertainment also spread shared cultural forms built on racist caricatures. Even when Americans were participating in something recognisably national, that did not mean it was just or inclusive. This point helps with complexity marks in essays: cultural unity and cultural exclusion could happen at the same time.

A strong final judgement for this topic is that the United States between **1800** and **1848** did create a new national culture through religion, literature, art, language, and reform. Yet that culture also revealed the nation’s deepest contradictions. It celebrated liberty while tolerating slavery, praised moral improvement while excluding women from equal citizenship, and imagined a shared America while many groups remained pushed to the edges of that vision.

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- A new American national culture emerged between **1800** and **1848**
- National culture developed through religion, literature, art, language, and reform
- The **Second Great Awakening** linked emotional conversion to moral reform
- **Charles Grandison Finney** and the **Burned-Over District** were central to revivalism
- Reform movements included **temperance**, **education reform**, **prison and asylum reform**, **abolition**, and **women’s rights**
- Women used reform work to enter public life despite the **cult of domesticity**
- The **Seneca Falls Convention (1848)** connected women’s rights to national ideals
- African Americans shaped culture through the **AME Church**, abolitionism, and writing
- Writers such as **Washington Irving** and **James Fenimore Cooper** created distinctively American literature
- **go beyondentalism**, led by **Emerson** and **Thoreau**, stressed self-reliance and nature
- The **Hudson River School** celebrated nature as a source of national identity
- The new national culture was real, but it remained limited by slavery, racism, and gender inequality

## Key Terms and Concepts

- national culture
- Second Great Awakening
- Burned-Over District
- cult of domesticity
- American Romanticism
- Beyondentalism
- Hudson River School


The Development of an American Culture - New national culture emerges