Education: Lesson Details 1. To explore the various voices that
contributed to competing definitions of mental disability in
antebellum America. 2. To examine public care for people with
mental illness in the mid-1800s. 3. To understand both the
reform efforts of Dorothea Dix and the results of those reform
efforts. 4. To analyze historical evidence, including
contradictory evidence, to construct a more complex picture of
the past.