Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of IHeartRadio.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

Today, a lot of Americans feel strongly about issues such as racial justice, women's rights, and protecting the environment.

And many believe in the power of non-violent civil disobedience to achieve

progress towards a better, fairer world. And while not all of us realize it, in many ways, we take after

a group of mid-19th century New England intellectuals, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,

and Margaret Fuller, among others, who espoused a philosophy

known as transcendentalism. The transcendentalist movement, which emerged in the mid-1830s, had a

straightforward idea at its core. Adherence argued that every person possesses the light of capital D divine truth,

and should look within themselves to find it, rather than simply conforming to whatever the powers that be want them to think.

But from that notion of spiritual self-reliance, a lot of other ideas blossomed,

from reverence for nature to the view that

everyone is entitled to freedom and equality. That led transcendentalists to become an important

part of other activist movements in America at the time that sought to abolish slavery and achieve

women's suffrage, for example. It was inspired, in part, by thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic.

The actual name of the movement, Transcendental, came from German philosopher Emmanuel Kant's 1788

manuscript critique of practical reason. Emerson was a great admirer of English romantic writers, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, both of whom he met when he traveled to Europe. And Frederick Henry Hedge, a Unitarian

Minister who studied in Germany, brought German philosophy back to America with him.

Along with a number of other interested writers, politicians, and thinkers at large,

they began meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1836. Before the article this episode is based on,

How Stuff Works spoke via email with Laura Dasso Walls, the William P. and Hazelby White Professor

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