"The American Scholar" is a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work "Nature" in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Emerson uses Transcendentalist and Romantic views to get his points across by explaining a true American scholar's relationship with nature.