AP®︎ US History: Topic 4.9 Flashcards

Belief that the United States differed fundamentally from Europe and possessed a distinctive democratic destiny

Movement emphasizing emotion, imagination, intuition, individual experience, the past, and nature’s spiritual power

Romantic experience of nature as beautiful, immense, awe-inspiring, and sometimes frightening

Ideas opposing inherited privilege and supporting individual rights, representative government, and freedom of conscience

Belief that people and societies could improve through education, moral development, and better institutions

Early internationally successful American author who adapted European folklore to American settings in “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Author of the Leatherstocking Tales who made the frontier, Natty Bumppo, American Indians, and wilderness major American literary subjects

White American idea romanticizing Indigenous people as noble figures supposedly destined to disappear before white settlement

Romantic poet whose “Thanatopsis” used American nature to explore mortality, spirituality, and humanity’s connection to the natural world

American writer who developed Gothic Romantic themes of intense emotion, psychological disturbance, mystery, and terror

Compiler of the 1828 “American Dictionary of the English Language,” which promoted standardized American spelling and usage distinct from British conventions

First major American school of landscape painting, using Romantic conventions to present American scenery as sublime and nationally meaningful

Founder of the Hudson River School whose dramatic landscapes explored nature, settlement, progress, and the possible decline of civilizations

Thomas Cole’s 1836 painting contrasting sublime wilderness with a sunlit cultivated landscape and the uncertain meaning of progress

Thomas Cole’s five-painting series showing civilization’s rise and destruction as a warning about commerce, empire, and republican decline

New England movement teaching that intuition and direct experience of nature reveal spiritual truth and support conscience, self-reliance, and nonconformity

Leading Transcendentalist who taught that individuals should find spiritual truth in nature and trust conscience over conformity

Emerson’s 1841 essay urging intellectual and moral independence through trust in one’s own conscience and intuition

Transcendentalist who practiced simple living at Walden Pond and resisted government policies supporting slavery and the Mexican–American War

Transcendentalist writer who argued that social conventions prevented women from freely developing their abilities

Margaret Fuller’s 1845 work applying individual development and human perfectibility to women’s restricted social condition

Architecture using Greek and Roman symmetry, columns, pediments, and domes to express order, civic dignity, and republican virtue

Popular 1820s–1840s style using temple-like façades and large columns to associate American institutions with ancient democracy and republicanism

Designed the University of Virginia’s Rotunda and academic buildings to connect classical architecture with learning, reason, and republican self-government

Romantic style using pointed arches, steep roofs, towers, and medieval decoration to evoke spirituality and historical tradition

Popular entertainment in which white performers used blackface to appropriate Black culture and spread racist stereotypes to national audiences

Emerson’s 1836 essay presenting nature as a route to spiritual understanding and individual independence