Concord, Massachusetts, 18 miles northwest of Boston, was the starting point for the War of Independence. On April 19, 1775, militia and minutemen from Concord and neighboring towns clashed with British regulars at the Old North Bridge and forced a bloody retreat by the King’s men back to safety in Boston. Some 4,000 provincials from 30 towns answered the call to arms. Concord claimed precedence as the site of THE FIRST FORCIBLE RESISTANCE TO BRITISH AGGRESSION, the words inscribed on the town’s 1836 monument to the battle (to the enduring resentment of nearby Lexington, which actually suffered the first American deaths that day). Concord’s boast took hold thanks to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in 1837 portrayed the brief skirmish at the bridge as “the shot heard round the world.” That moment has been a key to local identity ever since.

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Concord is widely known for another aspect of its history: It is intimately associated with the Transcendentalist movement in the quarter century before the Civil War. That distinction, too, it owes to Emerson. Born and raised in Boston, the most prominent public intellectual of Civil War America was the scion of six generations of New England divines, going back to Concord’s founding minister. In 1835, at age 32, Emerson returned to “the quiet fields of my fathers,” and from that ancestral base forged his career as a lecturer in Boston and beyond. He quickly became known as an eloquent voice for a new philosophy—calling on Americans to shed outmoded ways of thinking rooted in the colonial and British past and to put their trust in nature and in themselves. Partaking, as he saw it, of a divinity running through all Creation, Americans had an unprecedented opportunity to build an original culture on the principles of democracy, equality, and individual freedom. Emerson’s project was to unleash this infinite force.

In Concord, Emerson attracted a coterie of sympathetic souls who shared his vision, including Henry David Thoreau, who, as the author of Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” would ultimately surpass Emerson in renown. As the town gained literary stature, Concord became a byword for the philosophical movement it hosted. Henry Adams called Transcendentalism “the Concord Church.” Emerson projected his influence by means of books and lectures. He was among the founders of The Atlantic, calling in its pages for the abolition of slavery (and, a few months later, mourning the death of Thoreau). Concord itself emerged, in the words of Henry James, as “the biggest little place in America.”

Why Concord? How did a small town of some 2,200 inhabitants in 1860 become a cradle of not one but two revolutions? The best-known explanations distort the town’s history while inflating its self-regard. One view, popularized by Van Wyck Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Flowering of New England (1936), emphasizes Concord’s bucolic beauty, agricultural economy, and limited industrial development. It was a place fit for poets and philosophers, where nature and man came together in rare harmony. A second view, advanced by the Yale historian Ralph Henry Gabriel in 1940, holds that the Transcendentalists were the intellectual heirs of the minutemen. By challenging the materialism of business and politics and by insisting on the ideals of a democratic faith, Gabriel argued, Emerson