TIMELINE

1826
  • Lyceum movement begins

1829
  • David Walker’s Appeal … to the Colored Citizens of the World

1830
  • Joseph Smith publishes The Book of Mormon

1830s
  • Emergence of minstrelsy shows

1831
  • William Lloyd Garrison founds The Liberator

  • Nat Turner’s uprising in Virginia

1832
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson turns to transcendentalism

1833
  • Garrison organizes American Anti-Slavery Society

1834
  • New York activists create Female Moral Reform Society

1835
  • Abolitionists launch great postal campaign, sparking series of antiabolitionist riots

1836
  • House of Representatives adopts gag rule

1837
  • Grimké sisters defend public roles for women

1840
  • Liberty Party runs James G. Birney for president

1840s
  • Fourierist communities arise in Midwest

1841
  • Dorothea Dix promotes hospitals for mentally ill

1844
  • Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century

1845
  • Henry David Thoreau goes to Walden Pond

1846
  • Brigham Young leads Mormons to Salt Lake

1848
  • Seneca Falls Convention proposes women’s equality

1850
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

1851
  • Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick

1852
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1855
  • Dr. Sanger surveys sex trade in New York City

  • Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

1858
  • “Mormon War” over polygamy