The American Scholar; Self-Reliance. Compensation

Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed the Cambridge Phi Beta Kappa Society on August 31 1837 in his address titled The American Scholar. He was given the opportunity to speak as a result of his ground-breaking book Nature which was published a year earlier and formed a new perspective on the world for the developing American culture. Emerson offered perhaps for the first time in the nation's history a visionary philosophical framework for escaping from under its iron lids and creating a new uniquely American cultural identity at a time when American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe sixty years after the country's declaration of independence.