Book of Concord

American Transcendentalism originated in the mid 19th century. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were great impactors for the Transcendentalist movement. Thoreau and Emerson tried to send a message about the importance of being your own individual, but society today didn’t exactly catch on. Emerson states “...Envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide...Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist...Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind” (pg 362). With this…

Emerson and Thoreau. In One’s-Self I Sing Whitman writes about the, “simple separate person” (1329) who still has to deal with living by the laws of the land. I felt this poem was an optimistic call for mankind to believe in itself, and not to judge a book by its cover because that distracts from the whole of an individual. While we live in an exciting new time, we still have to obey the laws, even if that means pushing them to their limits. In Whitman’s poem Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry we can…

In Walden chapter two, Henry Thoreau points out on where lives and what he lives from. One of his main points in this chapter is that every person has a divine power to create and develop the kind of surrounding he chooses to live in and what he wants to live from. He also brings up the issue ofthe great feeling of achievement that comes with creating or coming up with something, like he did by building his own house.By speaking of creation, he does not try to raise his standards or raise…

Question 1: What role did technology change play in improvements in agriculture during the era of the market revolution? What kind of impact on values did such changes foster? When technology booms, there is no surprise to the beneficial advantages that come forth from agriculture, industry, and transportation: there was no exception in the market revolution of 1815. “One of the earliest and most important… was an iron plow introduced by Jethro Wood in 1819;” the plow led to the modification of…

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden consists of eighteen chapters in which he describes his two-year stay in Walden Pond. His purpose is clearly stated in chapter two titled “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”, where he states, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Thoreau’s Walden is to be read with the knowledge that it…

Transcendentalism, if That’s What We Want Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that was all about individualism. It urged people to break free from the norm and to just follow their own passions and aspirations. The movement began in the early 19th century, and one of the first leaders was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Under his wing, another key player: Henry David Thoreau. They felt the individual should be just that, an individual, and that nature was a great teacher and a magnificent tool…

Relying on yourself was a major understanding in the minds of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, who were both part of the transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism evolved in the middle of the 19th Century with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau. Transcendentalists believed the only way to learn the truth about God, the universe, the self, and everything else, one must transcend everyday human experience to a higher being existence in nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson is “The…

Nature in the Wind Aspects of nature can be found just about everywhere on our planet, and because of this, many different opinions from billions of writers from across the globe conclude different theories about how nature affects the Earth and the people who live within it. From the successful Disney film, “Pocahontas,” the naturistic song, “Colors of the Wind,” composed by Stephen Schwartz, connects deeply with the transcendental values of two writings by Henry Thoreau and Ralph Emerson.…

Throughout the semester we have been taught nothing more than Transcendentalism and about how Chris McCandless survived months on end until he ate the wrong thing one day. To me Transcendentalism means letting go of everything, such as technology, to go back into the nature or roots that our founding fathers had to endure. Chris McCandless before this semester meant nothing to me because I had never heard of him or even knew that someone had done something like this. I think that this…

Time and time again, society is influenced the many works of transcendentalist philosophers. Transcendentalism is the philosophical and literary movement that highlights themes of nature and spirituality while going against society and materialism. Christopher McCandless was in intelligent young man who believed in prospering through nature and the breach from the norms of society. He spent two years traipsing around the country before he ultimately starved to death in Alaska. McCandless…