The document discusses cultural and social reforms that occurred during the Antebellum period in America. Specifically, it mentions the rise of Romanticism which valued emotion, nature, and the individual spirit over reason. This led to the Hudson River School of landscape painting as well as works by authors like Cooper, Melville, Whitman, and Poe. Transcendentalism emerged advocating intuition over experience, as seen in the works of Thoreau and Emerson. Several utopian communities formed seeking social reform but most failed except the Mormons. Overall, reform movements grew in the North but had little impact in the pro-slavery South.