| Room 2: Evangelical Religion and Reform
From 1790 to 1840 a fiery evangelical fervor swept across the New Republic.
This “Great Awakening” marked the rise of new church denominations—the
Methodists, for example—and utopian societies such as that in Oneida, New
York. Faith inspired men and women to create a new social order, one without
poverty, disease, drunkenness, and other social ills. Fueled by the notion
that American democracy made it God's “chosen country,” evangelicals became
a driving force behind movements for temperance, the suppression of vice,
and reform of prisons and mental institutions. Printmakers’ images of churches,
hospitals, asylums, schools, and the penitentiary provide evidence of this
progressive philosophy in Maryland.
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