In the 1830s, a new movement was born in the United States. It was called transcendentalism. The New England transcendentalists were an influential but decidedly heterogeneous group of young writers, critics, philosophers, theologians, and social reformers whose activities centered in and around Concord, Massachusetts, from about 1836 to 1860. The father of the movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau was one of its most famous pupils.
