What Does it Mean to be an American? My Fund for Teachers Fellowship
Every year, I teach a unit on Transcendentalism. We read Thoreau. We talk about conscience. We talk about what it means to see an injustice and decide what to do about it. And every year, without fail, some student raises their hand and asks the question that I have never been able to answer as well as I wanted to.
"I'm just a high school student. What am I supposed to do about it?"
This summer, I went looking for a better answer.
I was awarded a Fund for Teachers fellowship, and I designed it around one idea: trace the line from Thoreau's philosophy to the movements that put that philosophy into action, and bring that line back to my students. The fellowship took me through Concord, Boston, Plymouth, and Salem, Massachusetts over six days in late June. I teach American Literature from the Puritans through Modernism. Almost every author I teach left a mark on this corner of the world. I went to find them.
Where It Starts
My curriculum begins with the Puritans, and the Puritans began with a sermon on a ship.
John Winthrop delivered "A Model of Christian Charity" in 1630 before his congregation ever set foot on American soil. He called for a "city upon a hill," a community bound by covenant, watched by the world. It is one of the most consequential ideas in American history, because Americans have never stopped reaching for it. The belief that this nation is called to something higher than mere survival, that the world is watching and we are responsible for what it sees, that is American exceptionalism at its origin point. It has powered our greatest achievements and been used to excuse some of our worst ones. We invoke it when we are proud of ourselves. We reach for it when we need to believe we are still capable of being better.
This summer, I stood at Winthrop's grave at King's Chapel Burying Ground in Boston, a quiet plot of ground five minutes' walk from the African Meeting House where Frederick Douglass would speak two hundred years later. The distance between those two places is the entire arc of my course.
In Plymouth, I stood at Pilgrim Hall Museum in front of a Geneva Bible that once belonged to William Bradford. Bradford wrote Of Plymouth Plantation as an act of faith and an act of memory. He wanted the story of what his people survived to outlast the people themselves, and he wanted them remembered as righteous. It is also how history gets layered and complicated, because the story Bradford was telling is inseparable from the story of the Wampanoag people who fed the Pilgrims through their first winter and watched their world come apart in the generations that followed.
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem holds Indigenous art and artifacts from that world, and standing in front of them, I understood again what I keep having to re-learn: that this country has always held multiple true things at once, and that reckoning with both is not a betrayal of patriotism. It is the most honest form of it.
At the Old South Meeting House in Boston, I found Phillis Wheatley. She was a member of this congregation while she was enslaved. She published her poetry in 1773, one of the first African Americans and one of the first American women to do so. Colonial Boston celebrated her genius and simultaneously refused to recognize her full humanity. That is not a contradiction that resolves neatly. It is the country at the exact moment it was inventing itself, already in an argument with its own stated ideals, already forcing the next generation to take up the fight.
And in Salem, among the maritime exhibits, I found Olaudah Equiano. He is one of the first authors in my textbook, one of the earliest and most powerful witnesses in American literature. He was enslaved, bought his own freedom, and wrote about all of it. He sailed these exact waters. The Atlantic off the Massachusetts coast was part of the same ocean that made the slave trade possible and that carried the people who would eventually dismantle it.
The Origin Point
I had spent years teaching Thoreau's Walden as this enormous philosophical document, and then I stood at the edge of the water and realized that the whole experiment happened in a space where people bring their children for picnics, swim their daily laps, and tote lawn chairs to journal amongst the trees. A simple, and normal place. The cabin site holds a pile of stones now, a marker left by visitors over generations. It is the most humble monument I have ever seen for one of the most consequential thinkers in American history.
A panel at the Thoreau museum details something I knew intellectually but had never felt until I stood there reading it: Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience traveled from this pond to Gandhi, who kept a copy with him. It traveled from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote that it convinced him refusing to cooperate with an evil system was not just a right but a moral obligation. One man, living deliberately in a small cabin in Massachusetts, handed something to the world that the world used to change itself.
From the pond, I drove to Thoreau Farm, where I experienced a conversation with our tour guide, Rich, that shifted something in how I understand my own course. I have taught the Bhagavad Gita before, in World Literature. I had never thought to connect it to American Literature. Rich showed me why I should have. The Bhagavad Gita was foundational to Transcendentalism, not a footnote to it. Emerson and Thoreau were reading Hindu Vedic philosophy and finding in it what they could not locate in the Puritan tradition they had inherited: the idea that humans are not separate from nature or from one another. The American Renaissance did not emerge from America alone. It emerged from a conversation across continents, and that conversation belongs in my course.
Thoreau did not think alone. He thought inside a community, and Concord was that community. I walked through Emerson's house. I stood in Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott grew up watching her neighbor Thoreau live out what he preached. I learned that May Alcott inspired Daniel Chester French to become a sculptor.
French went on to carve the Minuteman statue at the Old North Bridge and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The intellectual world of Concord in the 1840s ripples outward in every direction, into abolition, into sculpture, into a memorial on the National Mall that most Americans have stood before without knowing a woman from Concord set it in motion.
Where the Argument Got Tested
Before I left Concord, I found the Robbins House, the city's small African American history museum. Outside, a marker asks a question about the first free generation of a Black family who built their lives in this town: what does independence actually look like? Inside, I learned about Caesar Robbins, who served in the Revolution. His daughter Susan married a self-emancipated man named Jack Garrison. Their daughter Ellen became one of the first people to sue under the Civil Rights Act after being forcibly removed from a Baltimore train car. The Transcendentalist world and the abolitionist world were not separate. They were the same world, happening in the same small New England town at the same time, and the question that marker asks outside the Robbins House is the same question Winthrop was trying to answer on that ship in 1630. We are still answering it.
In Boston, I walked the Black Heritage Trail on Beacon Hill, fourteen sites tracing the history of Boston's free Black community before the Civil War. I stood outside the African Meeting House, the oldest surviving Black church in the country, where Frederick Douglass spoke and where abolitionists organized. The Transcendentalists were articulating a philosophy of conscience. The people in that building were betting their lives on it.
In the afternoon, I went to the ICA Boston to see "Say It Loud," an exhibition tracing the African American Art Movement from 1977 to now. On one wall, artist Shea Justice had layered Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells over the words "We the People," surrounded by today's headlines. It was not a cynical piece. It was a continuation, the same argument made in a new medium by people who have not given up on the terms. Derrick Adams. Deborah Roberts. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. The line from Thoreau to Douglass to the Black Arts Movement to living artists working in 2026 is real and traceable.
The Reckoning
My course begins with the Puritans. I ended my week in Salem.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born here. He spent his life trying to reckon with what this place had done. The House of the Seven Gables, which he used as the setting for his novel, still stands at the edge of the water. Standing in that house, I understood something about Hawthorne I had been teaching around rather than through: he could not leave Salem alone because Salem never left him alone.
The consequences of judgment and fear outlast the people who enacted them. That is what he was writing about. That is what Arthur Miller was writing about when he wrote The Crucible three centuries later.
At the Salem Witch Museum, a wall lays out a formula that historians have identified across witch hunts throughout the centuries: Fear plus Trigger equals Scapegoat. It applies to 1692. It applies to the Red Scare. It applies to every moment in American history when a community turned its anxiety into a verdict. We are a country that has done this more than once, and we will need people who can name the pattern when it begins again.
The Answer
I came home with more than I expected.
I came home with a direct connection between the Bhagavad Gita and American literature that I had never made before. I came home with the Robbins family, the witch hunt formula, Bradford's Geneva Bible, Wheatley at Old South Meeting House, Equiano at sea, Douglass at the African Meeting House, ICA and Peabody Essex exhibitions linking two centuries of conscience to artists working right now. I came home with the image of Thoreau's actual bed in the Concord Museum, a narrow wooden frame that made the abstraction of "simple living" suddenly and startlingly real.
This year, America turns 250. I stood at the graves of the people who imagined it, in the buildings where the argument over what it should become was first made out loud, in front of art created by people who are still making that argument today. I came home with the complicated, stubborn, specific pride of someone who has looked at the whole thing clearly and decided it is still worth fighting for. The kind that insists on the hard parts, because insisting on them is the only way the next 250 years go any differently than the last.
But the most important thing I came home with is this: every single person I encountered in that world, from the Minutemen at Concord Bridge to the abolitionists at the African Meeting House to the artists on the walls of the ICA, was an ordinary person who decided that their conscience required action. None of them were waiting to be important enough. None of them were waiting for someone to give them permission.
That is the answer I was looking for. That is what I am bringing back to my students.
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