I. TIMELINE

1821 Emma Hart Willard founds the Troy Female Seminary in New York.
Harvard's Women Working, 1800-1930 site includes a profile of Willard and links to works by and about Willard.

1824 Adams Female Academy opens in Londonderry, New Hampshire under the leadership of Zilpah Polly Grant.
See the Zilpah P. Grant Banister Papers, part of the Five College Archives Digital Access Project.

1825 Rebecca Webb Lukens promises her husband on his deathbed that she will manage the family's iron manufacturing business.
See Judith Scheffler's " . . . there was difficulty and danger on every side": The Family and Business Leadership of Rebecca Lukens [online] Pennsylvania History 66 (Summer 1999): 276-310.

1829 Margaret O'Neale "Peggy" Timberlake marries John Eaton.
Watch the Booknotes Interview with John Marszalek, author of The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny and Sex in Andrew Jackson's White House.
Find The Petticoat Affair in a library.

1829 Perkins School for the Blind Incorporated [Mass Moments, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities]

1830 The Indian Removal Act is signed into law. The ARC database includes a digital image of "Memorial from the ladies of Steubenville, Ohio, protesting Indian Removal, 02/15/1830."

1831 Maria Stewart's first essay, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, is published.
Watch Spencer Crew's lecture, Heritage Guild: Honoring David Walker and Maria Stewart [video; 1 hour, 20 min.]. A reading of Stewart's essay, noted above, begins about 19 minutes into the program.
Productions, a collection of Stewart's religious and political writings, is part of Digital Schomburg: African American Women Writers of the 19th Century.

1832 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society is founded.
Cornell's Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection includes annual reports of the society, beginning with 1835.

1833 Lydia Maria Child calls for immediate emancipation in An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Google Book Search).

1833 Oberlin College becomes the first coeducational collegiate institution in the United States.
Ohio Memory includes Oberlin student Betsy Mix Cowles' letters from the 1830s. Women and Social Movements in the United States includes documents that students can apply to the following question: How Did Oberlin Women Students Draw on Their College Experience to Participate in Antebellum Social Movements, 1831-1861?

1833 Prudence Crandall, a white Quaker, opens a teacher-training school for young African-American women in Canterbury, Connecticut. Local opposition forces the school to close the following year.
Crandall's letters and other relevant documents are reproduced in A Canterbury Tale: A Document Package for Connecticut's Prudence Crandall Affair [Gilder Lehrman Center].
See Kazimiera Kozlowski and David A. Poirier, .... To Get A Little More Learning. - Prudence Crandall's Female Boarding School CRM Online 20, no. 3 (1997): 40-43.

1834 Charlestown Convent Lies in Ruins [Mass Moments, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities]
Listen to Nancy Schultz' lecture about the Charlestown Convent Fire of 1834 [WGBH Forum].
The Ursuline Convent Collection [American Catholic History Research Center] includes a hand-written copy of an eyewitness report of the convent's burning.

1835 Advertisement for the capture of Harriet Jacobs. American Beacon, Norfolk Virginia, July 4, 1835 [Harriet Jacobs: Selected Writings and Correspondence]

1836 Angelina Grimke's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) is available as part of the Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection [Cornell University Llibrary].

1836 Whitman Mission
The Letters and Journals of Narcissa Whitman 1836-1847 [New Perspectives on the West, PBS]
See Whitman Mission National Historic Site includes information about the role of Narcissa and Marcus Whitman in establishing the Oregon Trail, as well as the conflicts that developed between the Cayuse people and the Whitmans.

1837 Laura Bridgman becomes a student at the Perkins School for the Blind.
The Perkins School for the Blind History Museum offers a Biographical profile of Bridgman and a Laura Bridgman Photo Gallery.
Preview Ernest Freeberg's book, The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language (Harvard University Press, 2001).

1837 Mary Lyon (1797-1849) founds Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts. See the Mary Lyon Collection, part of the Five College Archives Digital Access Project.

1838 Angelina Grimke addresses Legislature [Mass Moments, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities]

1838 Fanny Kemble [Women Working, 1870-1930]
Includes an overview of Kemble's life, as well as links to digital editions of Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 and other publications.
Catherine Clinton, author of Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars, discusses Fanny Kemble on Talking History [note date: March 22, 2004].

1838 Trail of Tears
The Trail of Tears: The Forced Relocation of the Cherokee Nation [Teaching with Historic Places Lesson Plans, National Park Service]

1839 Mississippi passes Married Women's Property Act.
LeAnne Howe's article, Betsy Love and the Mississippi Married Women's Property Act of 1839, appears in Mississippi History Now [Mississippi Historical Society].

II. RESEARCH SOURCES

Advice Literature

Peterson, Kelsy. The Glory of Woman: Prescriptive Literature in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture [online]. Durham, NC: Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, Duke University, 2003 [cited 21 November 2005]. Available from: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/women/prescriptive-lit/.
Researchers can browse this extensive, annotated bibliography by date.

Women Working, 1800-1930 [online]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library Open Collections Program, 2004- [cited 21 November 2005]. Available from: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/.
Select "Browse the Collection," then "Conduct of Life" to retrieve digital editions of books published from 1800 to 1930. Results display in reverse chronological order.

Artifacts

Browse the Quilt Index by time period (e.g., "1800-1840")

Wisconsin Historical Museum Children's Clothing Collection [online]. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, updated 26 June 2001 [cited 10 December 2001]. Available from: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/museum/collections/online/.
Tour the collection by decade (then by gender and type of clothing).

First-Person Accounts

Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson Slave Letters, 1837-1838 [Special Collections Library at Duke University]

Latta Family Letters, 1824-1830 [online]. Charlotte: University of North Carolina, 1999. Available from: http://libweb.uncc.edu/archives/latta/.

Patients' Voices in Early 19th Century Virginia Letters to Doct. Carmichael and Son [online]. Charlottesville: Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia, 2005. Available from: http://carmichael.lib.virginia.edu/.
The letters were written between 1819 and 1830.

Halnon, Mary. Women in America: 1820-1842 [online]. The lives of American women from the perspective of Europeans.

Census Data

Statistical Sources

Historical Census Browser
Researchers can examine state and county topics for individual census years and over time, as well as generate maps of selected data.

Explore Further

The database America: History & Life offers a simple option for limiting a search for articles and other sources to a specific time period. If you are searching for articles that cover 1820 to 1839, enter 1820d or 1830d in the "Time Period" row of the search screen. See America: History & Life: Searching by Time Period for an example using another time period.