Old South Leaflets: Concord

This educational reprint preserves Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1835 oration on Concord's bicentennial, recounting the April 19, 1775 battles that sparked the American Revolution. The circular vignette frames Old South Church, center of colonial civic life. By the 1880s, such affordable pamphlets fed mass appetite for history and patriotic narrative. Emerson's reflective prose elevated rural militia into national mythology, reshaping local conflict into universal principle.