Social Reform Movement sweeps Boston.

According to Lawrence Lader, “It was a time when almost every thinking Bostonian was convinced that the world could be remade at his doorstep. It was an age of unbounded confidence when Boston set out to re-create its own image of heaven on Beacon Hill. Societies for the promotion of reform sprouted endlessly.” Citing the work of Horace Mann, Samuel Gridley Howe, Dorothea Dix, Theodore Parker, Amelia Bloomer, Josiah Quincy, and Edward Beecher, he adds, “Boston, in fact, manufactured reform societies so efficiently that when an epidemic of smallpox broke out, one contemporary writer observed, a society was instantly organized to oppose it.”