Transcendentalism is a 19th-century school of American theological and philosophical thought that combined respect for nature and self-sufficiency with elements of Unitarianism and German Romanticism. Writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was the primary practitioner of the movement, which existed loosely in Massachusetts in the early 1800s before becoming an organized group in the 1830s.1
This movement coalesced in September of 1836 when four Harvard alumni met together after a celebration of the universities bicentennial. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the future of unitarianism. This initial meeting (at Willard’s Hotel) of Henry David Thoreau, George Ripley, George Putnam, and Frederic Henry Hodge soon grew into a movement. Over the next four years, 30 meetings were held of this group that would come to be known as the Transcendental Club. 2
1×
0:00
-0:40
*Reading taken from https://iep.utm.edu/am-trans/
As we will see, this movement had wide reaching societal implications.
