OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to
nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists
spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in
the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular
foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New
England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth,
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in
historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and
conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical
development of American capitalism.