"The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of a university founded in what year?
The American Scholar "The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College at the First Parish in Cambridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work "Nature", published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.
Phi Chi Society Phi Chi Society, or what would become known as the Eastern Fraternity of Phi Chi, was founded by Caleb Wakefield Clark with the support of Frederick Luther Osgood, Isaac Newton Fox and Alfred Judson Young, all of the class of 1889. In March 1889, Clark decided that the local fraternity, Delta Mu, needed organized opposition and formulated the plans that resulted in the organization of a quiz class. Just before his death on June 13, 1914, Doctor Clark; in a letter to T. Elmer Grubbs, senior associate editor of the "Phi Chi Quarterly", wrote: