Transcendentalists Publish The Dial
On this day in 1840 the first issue of the Transcendentalist magazine "The Dial" was published in Boston. The moving force behind this "journal in a new spirit" was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who stood at the center of Transcendentalism. The subject of the quarterly publication — the first genuinely original journal published in the United States — was, Emerson wrote, the "state of life and growth [that] is now . . . arriving." The men and women who contributed to "The Dial" were among the best minds of the nineteenth century. The magazine never made money or had more than a few hundred subscribers. It survived for less than four years, but Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists had unprecedented influence on American culture.
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