Five Significant Facts

1. While early Americans were busy constantly trying to expand westward, new technology developed. These inventions helped new westerners with agriculture. For example: John Deere made the steel plow in Illinois, Cyrus McCormick created the mechanical reaper, Samuel F.B. Morse used the morse code on the newly discovered telegraph. Deere and McCormick's inventions were of large assistance in new settlements in prairies and specifically the Great Plains, making farming much easier on grasslands.

2. Women's rights suffered during the nineteenth century. Lowell factory girls lost benefits and sufficient wages and for therefore considered striking. Women were not even able to vote in many states. They could not make wills or file lawsuits and a woman's husband was always considered the owner of her land. However, during the 1840s and 50s there were more attempts made to regain these rights. Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were responsible for Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In addition, Dorthea Dix fought for the mentally ill, Julia Ward Howe & Harriet Beecher Stowe battled against slavery, and the Grimke sisters, Lucy Stone & Sojourner Truth pushed in favor of women's rights and freed slaves.

3. With new reforms being put in place, many fantasized about their communities becoming utopias. The first of several was Brook Farm in 1841 which unfortunately failed. Three other utopias were founded in New England including Hopedale, Fruitlands, and Northampton, but they all failed as well. Not many utopias did succeed, but a few were fairly prosperous. Seven small Amana colonies near the Iowa river remain, to this day, mostly due to their profitable woolen goods.

4. Between 1840 and 1855 there was a large explosion of writing success. This prosperity came from writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau who lived in a house with Emerson for two years, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson.

5. Thoreau and Emerson were most well-known for being Transcendentalists, but many other writers of the era were largely influenced by Transcendental ideas. What Transcendentalism is was never easily defined because it possesses many different concepts that depend on the writer himself. Emmanuel Kant was a German philosopher who tried give the word a true definition in his Critique of Practical Reason. To Kant Transcendentalism meant "the knowledge or understanding a person gains intuitively, although it lies beyond direct physical experience". Many other philosophers, such as Plato, Pascal, and Swedenborg, came up with different ideas as to what it truly meant as well. With everyone believing different things about what the philosophy was, people did eventually come to understand that Transcendentalists were writers who focused their work on Nature and only the bright points of it; many writers such as Hawthorne and Melville thought this was too unrealistic and focussed their writing on the "area not always shimmering".