Frances Wright attempted to reform America between 1825 and 1839. Her activities were unlike any other for a woman of her time. In public lectures to audiences of men and women throughout the East and Midwest, she spoke on the evils of orthodox religion and advocated abolition, equal rights, and universal education for all people regardless of gender or class. In both action and thought, she challenged all notions of nineteenth-century womanhood. Wright's public career helps illuminate the history of antebellum American reform because it reflects the ferment and range of such activity.This study will demonstrate that ideology as a category of study is useful when examining nineteenth-century women in several interrelated contexts. Unlike previous studies examining her as a women's rights advocate, however, this is not a feminist interpretation. Wright's significance as a humanitarian is much larger than any emphasis she gave to women in her rhetoric. Part of her motivation, like her sisters in benevolence reform, involved Christianity and orthodox religion. But unlike most women of her time, Wright believed religion prevented the realization of republican values -- in particular, equality -- because the clergy perpetuated elements of theology scientific methods could not prove true. Intellectual development and social improvement could not occur, she boldly asserted, until Americans threw off religion's blanket of ignorance. Most Americans rejected Wright's denunciations of religion and calls for equality, but to some her message rang true. Her rhetoric planted in progressive women concepts about religious constraints on females and the possibilities of egalitarianism. These individuals would become leaders in the women's rights movement during the final decades of the century. / Department of History

This thesis examines the dynamic change the market revolution had on social and cultural institutions in the American West. Specifically, it investigates how market forces influenced rural life patterns for farmers, urban mercantile culture and regional commercial interests. Davenport, Iowa is the focus for the narrative’s hinge, as this midsized western marketplace represented a link between its farmers and the regional markets in Chicago. This project uses wheat and the prairie region in antebellum Iowa and Illinois as a case study and examines the cultural and social development of farmers and merchants in the marketplace. Following wheat from farm to market, both locally and regionally, helps to explain how Americans understood the commodity at each economic level. Time and place were central to the American West's economic, social, and cultural development and this thesis considers just a moment in its history. A intersect of rural, agricultural, technological, and environmental histories are at the project's core, but it also attempts to make sense of frontier capitalism and the ramifications it had on farming and the grain industry. The market revolution gradually influenced and shaped the nation’s agricultural economy and the people that preformed its labor and production. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection