Kate Culkin’s new book, Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press, July 2025), is a dual biography of the sisters who worked behind the scenes to shape the image of their famous father. In honor of the book’s release this month, the Emerson House will be showcasing items from our Ellen and Edith collections, some of which will be on display to the public for the first time.

To read more about the people and places of Concord, Massachusetts, we invite you to explore the current and back issues of Discover Concord, a visitor-focused magazine available in print and online. The Emersons and their friends are frequent subjects of articles, some of which are penned by our own Emerson House guides.

This year, the spring reopening of the Emerson House coincides with the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. In promoting environmental protection and celebrating the web of life, Earth Day reflects Ralph Waldo Emerson’s own reverence for nature—a common theme in his writings. Today, and beyond, we find inspiration in Emerson’s poems—his words exalting the wisdom of a bee; the beauty of a wildflower; the sentience of a tree.

The opening battle in America’s war for independence took place at Concord’s Old North Bridge on April 19, 1775—an event later memorialized by Emerson as the “shot heard round the world.” On the 250th anniversary of that fateful day, we look back at the Emerson family’s connections to April 19th: from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandparents witnessing those first shots in 1775, to his role in Concord’s centennial celebrations in 1875.

A 15-minute silent film about Ralph Waldo Emerson from the 1920s. Selections from his life and writings are illustrated with black-and-white footage from around the town of Concord, Massachusetts, including the Old Manse, the Emerson House, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and the Old North Bridge.

When the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association (RWEMA) took ownership of the Emerson House in 1930 and turned it into a seasonal museum, the original contents of Emerson’s study were moved across the street to a replica in the Concord Museum to preserve year-round access for visitors. Today, both can be visited. In 2020, the Concord Museum produced a short video tour of Emerson’s home study, discussing its importance both to Emerson and as the intellectual center of mid-19th century America.

The friendship between two intellectual powerhouses of the mid-nineteenth century—Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson—began with a visit to Concord in 1836. Fuller later joined the “Transcendental Club” and her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century—the first major feminist work in America—grew from an essay published in The Dial magazine under Emerson’s editorship.

Continuing a series on the strong women in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life with a profile of his wife Lidian (Lydia) Jackson Emerson, who worked to relieve the suffering of people and animals while also managing a busy household and supporting her husband’s work. A co-founder of Concord’s Female Anti-Slavery Society, Lidian encouraged Emerson’s own involvement in the abolitionist movement.

The history and provenance of Diamond the rocking horse, a beloved family artifact in the Emerson House nursery. Already an antique when Lidian Jackson bought it in 1825, Diamond took a circuitous route to Concord, its story touching on themes of childhood, illness, family, and domesticity—and involving two dramatic incidents at sea.

Emerson House guides share answers to some of the frequently asked questions by visitors to the house.

In his new documentary film Ralph Waldo Emerson: Give All to Love, Michael Maglaras celebrates the 220th anniversary of Emerson’s birth by “telling the story of the father of American thought and literature and…his importance in contemporary life.”

Referencing Jeffrey S. Cramer’s book, Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to explore the question of whether the two friends called one another “Waldo” and “Henry.”