Ralph Waldo Emerson Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836. Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History.

"There was a new consciousness." That is how Emerson, writing in 1880, summed up the cultural revolution that defined the most advanced thought and art in the United States in the decades before the Civil War. To many at the time, Emerson's first book, Nature, was the bible of the movement. It begins by inviting the new generation to leave the past behind, to "enjoy an original relation to the universe." It ends by exhorting the reader to "build your own world." These "new views"—Emerson's preferred term for what others would soon call Transcendentalism—never became a mass cultural or media phenomenon. Most Americans were more interested in the gold in California than the wealth that Emerson said was to be found within, and more interested in building railroads and factories than in creating the newer world he announced as imminent. But as a prophet or popular philosopher Emerson inspired thousands in his time and helped articulate for all time the idea that America is less a place than a process—a becoming new. Shown is a presentation copy of the first edition, signed "R.W.E."

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