The role played by religion during the colonial pre-apartheid era are traditional leaders.
The three groups that impact social welfare policy the most are:
1. The elderly and handicapped citizens
2. The unemployed and the
3. The poor.
Social welfare policy are geared towards improving the lives of the less privileged in the society, they are mainly meant to alleviate poverty.
Welfare assistance comes in various forms such as cash aid, house subsidy, utilities subsidy, food stamp, job training, etc.
The second great awakening was a religious movement, or a set of ideas, regarding how a person should deal with religion and with themselves and the society. It was mostly ground in Baptist and Methodist teachings and spread through America like wildfire. The movement was about emotional and supernatural elements of life and religion and against the ideas of enlightenment.
Social reform before the civil war was always a problematic thing because there was slavery in the south, women didn't have suffrage, unions were non-existent, and there were many other problems. The most that social reformers could do was help decide which states would be slave states and which wouldn't, which more or less prevented a huge amount of slave states, but there wasn't much that could be done.
Nativism is the idea that immigration is bad because immigrants take jobs away from local population that was born in the country to which the immigrants came. Before the civil war, immigration was sometimes limited for numerous ethnic groups based on things like race or religion or similar things. For example, there was a general dislike for Catholics such as the Irish because they were a cheap workforce and it was believed that Catholicism would affect their political decisions.
The Hammurabi Code is probably best known in popular knowledge through the phrase "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth".
As the name implies, this was based on the idea that for every crime you commit, a punishment of equal severity would await you, in this sense you would knew what to expect for a certain illegal/bad deed that you have done.
