How Self-Reliant Was Emerson?

Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, emerged from an exceptionally tight-knit community.

- By Mark Greif

In the lead-up to the bicentennial of American independence in 1976, a graduate student sent a proposal to an editor at a trade publisher in New York. Would he consider taking on a book about the Minutemen and their “shot heard round the world,” set painstakingly in a history of Concord, Massachusetts, the town where the North Bridge fight broke out? In 1977, that book—which was also the student’s dissertation—won a Bancroft Prize, the highest honor in the history profession. The Minute men and Their World remains a classic, memorable within a wave of “community studies” that sought to explain big turning points—such as the outbreak of the Revolution and the Salem witch trials— at the level of local ties, focusing on loyalties and antipathies among neighbors, families, holders of property and office, laborers and servants.