The invention of the telephone was an ongoing and convoluted process throughout the mid-nineteenth century; however, popular history and patent law credits Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson with the invention of the telephone, in 1875. 

Noah Webster was an early American lexicographer and educational reformer. Webster wrote extensive textbooks teaching generations of young Americans how to read, write, and spell. He is credited with helping secularize and nationalize the American education process. 

The antebellum period saw a wide range of social reform movements develop. Most of these had their roots in the burgeoning evangelical Christianity of the time period. Abolitionism, women's rights and suffrage, public education, and temperance all saw reform societies founded on their behalf. The labor movement did not begin in force until the late nineteenth century and more widespread factory work in America.

Alexis de Tocqueville was minor French noble who undertook a tour of America in 1831, officially to study the American prison system, but instead analyzed all of American society. In 1835, he published his analysis of American society in his book Democracy in America. De Tocqueville's book is still widely read and considered one of the chief sources on society in Jacksonian America. In particular, de Tocqueville makes many claims about why America can produce a vibrant democracy.

Abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel is entitled Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In 1845 in his periodical United States Magazine and Democratic Review, John L. O'Sullivan famously wrote that it was America's "manifest destiny" to expand and inhabit the rest of the continent. Manifest Destiny refers to the 19th century U.S. policy of expansion towards the Pacific coast.

The Second Great Awakening, a nation-wide religious revival that occurred from roughly 1801 to 1850, had widespread influence beyond just religious measures. Abolitionism, education reform, the women's rights movement, temperance, and prison reform were among the many outgrowths of the Awakening. As compared to later religious movements such as Fundamentalism, the Second Great Awakening promoted action over strict doctrine and theology.

The Souls of Black Folks (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935), which challenged the prevailing notion that African Americans were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era, were written by W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the most prominent voices of the African American Civil Rights movement. Racist thinkers of the early twentieth century in America waged a continued campaign to demonize and vilify African Americans, and to scapegoat them for any social or economic failures seen during the Reconstruction Era. Dubois' clear, lucid prose directly and implicitly challenged these racist propaganda talking points.

Plessy is important because it represents an example of significant legislative gains in racial equality being surreptitiously undermined by judicial mandate. The court in Plessy ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment was not violated when Homer Plessy was expelled from a "whites-only" train car, because so long as there existed "separate, but equal" facilities, there was no violation of equal rights.

Each of these writers was referred to as "muckraking journalists." The term muckraker was used in the Progressive Era to characterize reform-minded American journalists who wrote largely for all popular magazines. They relied on their own investigative journalism reporting; muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and political corruption. Muckrakers represented the beginning of modern investigative journalism and "watchdog" journalism as we still know it today.