50 Fun Facts About Transcendentalism

Which everyday product did Thoreau's family make in a factory where he worked for most of his adult life?

Pencils paid the Thoreau family's bills, and Henry worked out how to make good ones from poor graphite by binding it with clay.

Which Robin Williams film has schoolboys read Thoreau aloud at secret meetings in a cave?

Dead Poets Society grew out of writer Tom Schulman's own schooldays at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville.

Which Indian independence leader ran a synopsis of a Thoreau essay in his paper Indian Opinion?

Mahatma Gandhi was a year into his first campaign in South Africa at the time, and he told readers that Thoreau's example applied exactly to Indians in the Transvaal.

Which poet mailed Emerson his first collection in 1855 and was greeted 'at the beginning of a great career'?

Walt Whitman had the private letter printed in the New York Tribune without asking, then put the greeting in gold leaf on his second edition, a stunt credited with inventing the book blurb.

Which phrase about the American Revolution comes from an Emerson hymn written for an 1837 monument?

The shot heard round the world reached its first audience at the monument's dedication, where a local choir sang Emerson's lines to the tune Old Hundredth.

Which novelist, taught biology by Thoreau as a girl, mocked her father's commune in Transcendental Wild Oats?

Louisa May Alcott lived through the experiment as a child, with Emerson as her literary mentor, and later drew on her New England girlhood for Little Women.

In Thoreau's image of a man who does not keep pace with his companions, which musician does that man hear?

A different drummer became shorthand for going your own way, and William Melvin Kelley borrowed the phrase as the title of his 1962 debut novel.

Which Thoreau book recounts two years, two months and two days in a cabin beside a Massachusetts pond?

Walden squeezes the whole stay into a single year of seasons, and the woodland where the cabin stood belonged to Emerson.

Which Boston-born poet mocked the Transcendentalists as Frog-Pondians, after the pond on the city's Common?

Edgar Allan Poe dismissed their prose as metaphor run mad, though he told a friend that he disliked only the pretenders and sophists among them.

Which civil rights leader first met the idea of nonviolent resistance by reading Thoreau at Morehouse College?

Martin Luther King Jr. recalled being so moved by the idea of refusing to go along with injustice that he read the essay several times over.

Which Thoreau essay, sparked by a night in jail, argues that governments should not overrule conscience?

Civil Disobedience was first printed in 1849 as Resistance to Civil Government. The title everyone now knows appeared only in 1866, four years after Thoreau's death.

Which Emerson essay declares that 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'?

Self-Reliance is among Emerson's most famous essays, and it also insists that whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Which novelist joined a Transcendentalist commune to fund his wedding, then mocked it in The Blithedale Romance?

Nathaniel Hawthorne never believed in the experiment and left within the year, yet the stay inspired the only novel he wrote in the first person.

Which former whaler caricatured Emerson as the character Mark Winsome in his satire The Confidence-Man?

Herman Melville gave Winsome a 'practical disciple', Egbert, modelled on Thoreau, and their talk is read as a jab at a creed too proud to ask for help.

Which inner faculty did Transcendentalists trust above objective empiricism as the surest guide to truth?

Intuition mattered because Transcendentalists believed any individual could reach completely original insights alone, with little deference to past masters.

Which view of people and nature, rejected by Anti-Transcendentalists, is a core belief of Transcendentalism?

Inherently good was the premise: Transcendentalists held that it is society and its institutions that corrupt the purity of the individual.

Which Massachusetts town, raided by British troops in April 1775, was home to both Emerson and Thoreau?

Concord was Thoreau's birthplace, and Emerson bought a house there in 1835 that he named Bush. A whole literary community grew up around him.

According to the first chapter of Thoreau's cabin memoir, the mass of men lead lives of quiet what?

Desperation is Thoreau's verdict on his hard-working neighbours in Economy, the long first chapter, which also tallies what his own house cost to build.

According to a much-quoted line from Emerson's essay Civilization, to what should you hitch your wagon?

A star was Emerson's image for borrowing the might of the elements: he had just praised tide mills that hire the moon to grind corn.

Which tax had Thoreau left unpaid for six years when he was jailed overnight in 1846?

A poll tax was the charge he withheld in protest at slavery and the Mexican–American War. He walked free the next day when someone, probably his aunt, paid it against his wishes.

Which utopian community did former minister George Ripley found at West Roxbury, outside Boston, in 1841?

Brook Farm was announced to the Transcendental Club in 1840 and was fully closed by 1847, a year after the ambitious communal building it was raising caught fire.

Which first editor of the Transcendentalists' journal became the New-York Tribune's first female correspondent?

Margaret Fuller also wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century, considered the first major feminist work in the United States. She died in a shipwreck off Fire Island in 1850.

Which Transcendentalist magazine of the 1840s did Emerson introduce as a 'Journal in a new spirit'?

The Dial lasted only four years as the chief publication of the Transcendentalists, but the title was revived more than once and survived until 1929.

Which liberal Christian denomination, strong in Boston in the early 1800s, did Transcendentalism grow out of?

Unitarianism prized free conscience and intellectual reason, and Transcendentalism is described as an organic consequence of that emphasis, not a rejection of it.

Which abolitionist did Thoreau defend in a speech two weeks after the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry?

John Brown had yet to hear a friendly public word, by Emerson's account, when Thoreau sent notices round to his neighbours and spoke up for him in a public hall.

Which Scottish-born naturalist, then young and unknown, met Emerson in Yosemite in 1871?

John Muir had carried a copy of Emerson on his backcountry trips, and after one day together the older man offered him a teaching post back east, which he declined.

Which literary label covers the Anti-Transcendentalist writers who stressed human fallibility, guilt and sin?

Dark Romanticism began as a response to the Transcendental movement, and its writers doubted that social reform could ever make people perfect.

Which image did Emerson use in Nature for the moment in the woods when all mean egotism vanishes?

A transparent eyeball is nothing itself yet sees all: Emerson meant an eye that absorbs instead of reflecting, taking in everything nature offers without bias.

Where did Emerson give an 1838 graduation address that got him denounced as an atheist?

Harvard Divinity School had only seven seniors graduating that year, yet the outcry over the speech kept Emerson from being asked back to speak for thirty years.

Which Emerson speech did Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. hail as the nation's intellectual declaration of independence?

The American Scholar was delivered to a Phi Beta Kappa audience in 1837, and the group later named its literary quarterly after the speech.

Which Transcendentalist commune of 1843 at first used no animal labour or artificial light and lasted only seven months?

Fruitlands residents ate no animal products, drank only water and bathed in it unheated, but food ran short in the first winter and everyone left.

Which term, the title of an 1841 Emerson essay, names the divine spirit said to unite all people as one being?

The Over-Soul shows the influence of Vedanta as well as Plato and Plotinus, and it holds that at some level the souls of all people are connected.

Which Königsberg philosopher's use of the term gave Transcendentalism its name, as Emerson explained in 1842?

Immanuel Kant had answered Locke by arguing that a whole class of ideas does not come from the senses at all, and he called those forms Transcendental.

Which Christian rite did Emerson object to administering, leading him to resign his Boston pulpit in 1832?

Communion, Emerson wrote, was a way of commemorating Christ that did not suit him, and he considered that reason enough to abandon it.

Which movement of local lecture societies persuaded Emerson that he could make a career as a speaker?

Lyceums offered talks on all sorts of topics, and Emerson went on to give some 1,500 lectures, writing most of his important essays for the platform first.

Which Scottish author of Sartor Resartus met Emerson in 1833 and used him as an unofficial American agent?

Thomas Carlyle was a strong influence on Emerson, who tried in 1835 to persuade him to cross the Atlantic and lecture in the United States.

Which disease, which also killed two of his sisters, ended Thoreau's life at the age of 44 in 1862?

Tuberculosis first struck Thoreau in 1835, and his last decline began with bronchitis caught on a late-night trip to count tree rings in a rainstorm.

Which ancient Asian scripture did Thoreau say he bathed his intellect in each morning beside his pond?

The Bhagavad Gita made the modern age and its literature seem puny and trivial, Thoreau wrote, and Indian religions fed directly into Transcendentalist thought.

According to a famous line in Thoreau's essay Walking, the preservation of the world lies in what?

Wildness meant more to Thoreau than scenery: the essay redefines it as life itself, and it reached print in the Atlantic Monthly only after his death in 1862.

Which cemetery, opened with an Emerson speech in 1855, holds his grave and Thoreau's on Author's Ridge?

Sleepy Hollow was laid out as a natural garden in keeping with Emerson's own aesthetic principles, and he was buried there decades after dedicating it.

Which minister from Bangor, Maine, lent the Transcendental Club its first nickname, as it met when he visited?

Frederic Henry Hedge, schooled in Germany as a boy, was an important source of the circle's knowledge of German philosophy.

In which house beside the North Bridge, built for his grandfather, did Emerson draft Nature?

The Old Manse was later rented for $100 a year by a novelist who named a story collection after it, and its upstairs windows had overlooked the 1775 fight at the bridge.

Which eighteenth-century visionary did Emerson profile as 'the Mystic' in Representative Men?

Emanuel Swedenborg is counted by scholars among the pervasive influences on Transcendentalism. Emerson's other subjects included Shakespeare, Goethe and Montaigne.

Which French socialist's blueprint did a Transcendentalist commune near Boston adopt in 1844?

Charles Fourier's admirers, a New York newspaper editor among them, pressed the struggling commune to follow his pattern more closely, and its journal took up his cause.

Which Transcendentalist bookshop owner opened the first English-language kindergarten in the United States?

Elizabeth Peabody read ten languages, managed the movement's magazine for a time and in 1849 became the first publisher of Thoreau's essay on resisting government.

Which Boston minister defined democracy as 'of all the people, by all the people', words echoed at Gettysburg?

Theodore Parker used the phrase often, and Lincoln's law partner William Herndon claimed to have handed the future president a copy of one such address.

Which US president was sent Emerson's 1838 letter protesting the forced removal of the Cherokee?

Martin Van Buren had ordered the Army to round up the Cherokee and march them west, and Emerson wrote that such a crime would rob Americans of a country too.

Which federal law, denounced by Emerson in an 1851 speech, did he call a 'filthy enactment' in his journal?

The Fugitive Slave Act required every citizen to help return people who had escaped slavery, which carried the system into Massachusetts itself.

In his lecture The Transcendentalist, Emerson called the movement simply which philosophy as it appeared in 1842?

Idealism, Emerson told his Boston audience, begins from consciousness, while its age-old rival materialism begins from the data of the senses.

Which word does Thoreau exclaim three times in a row, urging readers to keep their affairs to two or three?

Simplicity was the point of his whole experiment: he told readers to count half a dozen instead of a million and keep their accounts on a thumbnail.