This book is a study of the efforts of the Transcendentalists of the New England Renaissance to reform the Unitarian church. Although the basic religious orientation of the Transcendentalist movement has been generally agreed on, Dr. Hutchinson believes that it was far more than a tendency to appraise the universe in terms of an intuitive faith.

This book, awarded the Brewer Prize by the American Society of Church History, is a study of the efforts of the Transcendentalists of the New England Renaissance to reform the Unitarian Church. Scholarly interpreters have, in general, agreed on the basic religious orientation of the Transcendentalist Movement. Mr. Hutchison, however, believes that it was far more than a tendency to appraise the universe in terms of an intuitive faith. Most of the men closely associated with the Movement in New England were Unitarian ministers, and he has concentrated on their attempt to apply transcendental thinking to theology and to the everyday problems of the parish ministry. At the same time he has produced a sympathetic appraisal of the conservative Unitarian position in his review of the so-called Transcendentalist Controversy. Yale Historical Publications, Miscellany 71. Mr. Hutchison is associate professor of American civilization at The American University in Washington, D.C.

While scholars of Transcendentalism are quick and quite right to point out the literary legacy that emerged from it, they less often acknowledge the religious context from which it emerged. The "Transcendentalists" were, without exception, liberal religionists, and most of them had explicit ties to religion and religious institutions. The vast majority of key figures in the movement were active or former ministers deeply concerned with the spiritual welfare of their communities.

A comprehensive history of American transcendentalism which originated with a number of nineteenth-century intellectuals including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and examines their philosophical and religious roots in Europe and opposition to slavery.

Barbara L. Packer's long essay "The Transcendentalists" is widely acknowledged by scholars of nineteenth-century American literary history as the best-written, most comprehensive treatment to date of Transcendentalism. Previously existing only as part of a volume in the magisterial Cambridge History of American Literature, it will now be available for the first time in a stand-alone edition. Packer presents Transcendentalism as a living movement, evolving out of such origins as New England Unitarianism and finding early inspiration in European Romanticism. Transcendentalism changed religious beliefs, philosophical ideas, literary styles, and political allegiances. In addition, it was a social movement whose members collaborated on projects and formed close personal ties. Transcendentalism contains vigorous thought and expression throughout, says Packer; only a study of the entire movement can explain its continuing sway over American thought. Through fresh readings of both the essential Transcendentalist texts and the best current scholarship, Packer conveys the movement's genuine expectations that its radical spirituality not only would lead to personal perfection but also would inspire solutions to such national problems as slavery and disfranchisement. Here is Transcendentalism in whole, with Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller restored to their place alongside such contemporaries as Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Jones Very, Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Orestes Brownson, and Frederick Henry Hedge.

One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.