Through his writing & his own personal philosophy Ralph Waldo Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's traditional sense of history & showed Americans how to be creators of their own circumstances His mandate which called for harmony with rather than domestication of nature & for a reliance on individual integrity rather than on materialistic institutions is echoed in many of the great American philosophical & literary works of his time & ours & has given an impetus to modern political & social activism Larzer Ziff's introduction to this collection of fifteen of Emerson's most significant writings provides the important backdrop to the society in which Emerson lived during his formative years