The Nullification Crisis was a sectional crisis during the presidency of Andrew Jackson created by South Carolina's 1832 Ordinance of Nullification. This ordinance declared by the power of the State that the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the sovereign boundaries of South Carolina. The tariff was opposed in the South and parts of New England. Its opponents expected that the election of Jackson as President would result in the tariff being significantly reduced.[1] On July 14, 1832, after Calhoun had resigned the Vice Presidency in order to run for the Senate where he could more effectively defend nullification,[4] Jackson signed into law the Tariff of 1832. This compromise tariff received the support of most northerners and half of the southerners in Congress.[5

Temperance reforms as a mass movement originated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Before this, although there were diatribes published against drunkenness and excess,[1] total abstinence from alcohol was very rarely advocated or practiced. There was also a concentration on hard spirits rather than on total abstinence from alcohol and on moral reform rather than legal measures against alcohol. The organised Temperance movement started in the American revolution in Connecticut, Virginia and New York State with farmers forming associations to ban whiskey distilling with the movement spreading to eight states, advocating temperance rather than abstinence taking positions on moral issues such as observance of the Sabbath. [3]The American Temperance Society was formed in 1826, within 12 years claiming more than 8,000 local groups and over 1,500,000 members. At roughly the same time temperance societies were founded in the UK, inspired by a Belfast professor of theology, and Presbyterian Church of Ireland Minister Rev. John Edgar,[4] who poured his stock of whiskey out of his window in 1829, concentrated their fire on spirits rather than wine and beer.[2]

The Seneca Falls was an early and influential women's rights convention, the first to be organized by women in the Western world, in Seneca Falls, New York. It spanned two days: 19 July 1848 and 20 July 1848. Female Quakers local to the area organized the meeting along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a skeptical non-Quaker. The meeting had six sessions, included a lecture on law, a humorous presentation, and multiple discussions about the role of women in society. Stanton and the Quaker women presented two prepared documents, the Declaration of Sentiments and an accompanying list of resolutions, to be debated and modified before being put forward for signatures. Between 1881 and 1922 which identified the Seneca Falls Convention as the start of the push for women's suffrage in the United States.[1] By 1851, another convention was organized, called the National Women's Rights Convention, in Worcester, Massachusetts, the issue of women's right to vote had become a central tenet of the United States women's rights movement.[2]

Dorothea Dix created the first generation of American mental asylums. was an author, teacher and reformer. Her efforts on behalf of the mentally ill and prisoners helped create dozens of new institutions across the United States and in Europe and changed people’s perceptions of these populations. During the Civil War, she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses. Her own troubled family background and impoverished youth served as a galvanizing force throughout her career, although she remained silent on her own biographical details for most of her long, productive life.

The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five bills passed in the United States in September 1850, which defused a four-year confrontation between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). The compromise, drafted by Whig Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky and