As a professor of early American literature, I often find myself guiding students through some portion of Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous 1841 essay “Self-Reliance.” In my survey classes, Emerson comes after students have waded through the Puritans’ stringent sermons and attempted to follow the mercurial frolicking of Benjamin Franklin. By the time we make it to Emerson, my students are drawn to his enticingly modern admonition that they should “believe [their] own thought[s]” (Emerson 2003: 117) and his subsequent call to “trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” (118). Though Emerson's text is nearly two hundred years old, its message still resonates. In her new book Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America, literary historian Ana Schwartz provides a well-researched and insightful analysis of the persistent American aspiration to “know ourselves.” By closely reading several seventeenth-century, colonial New England texts, Schwartz illustrates that Emerson's quest...
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