Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Let the river roll which way it will, cities will rise on its banks.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." Essays: Second Series. James Munroe and Company, 1844, p. 177.
Nations come and go—are born and die, but generally the cities remain as part of the new state or empire.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Cahokia was a very large Native American city just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. In 1250, its population was about 15,000, comparable to that of London or Paris during the same period. At the time of the American Revolution, it was larger than New York, Boston of Philadelphia having 40,000 inhabitants at its peak. Tiahuanaco was a large city—30,000 at its peak—in Bolivia. The very ability to create and sustain such large communities shows that the Indians of the Americas were not simply hunter-gatherers but were very sophisticated in manipulating their environment and organizing large numbers of people.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
