Through the formative century of American letters and beyond, Ralph Waldo Emerson was “the arch radical of the world.” Among the wider circle of Americans we remember as Transcendentalists, such individuals as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Muir, William James, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ansel Adams are practically unimaginable without the revolutionary influence of Emerson. This course will seek to recover the radical wisdom of the “Sage of Concord” as a means of bringing America’s revolutionary wisdom into focus, from the founding period to the closing of the western frontier.