While previous collections of Emerson essays have tended to be a sort of stocktaking or retrospective look at Emerson scholarship the present collection divided into four sections follows a more prospective trajectory for Emerson studies based on the recent increase in global perspectives in nearly all fields of humanistic studies. The first section of essays is about the authors transatlantic and wider connections and the circulation of his influence to thinkers such as Nietzsche. The next two sections register Emersons encounters with the global worlds of science and philosophy from his early encounters with science in France to his meeting with the leading scientists of the day like Faraday during his English lecture tour of 1848. Finally in the extremely rich concluding section Emersons engaging with the major social problem of his time entitles him to be considered as not just cosmopolitan but even militant in his embrace of the violent abolitionist John Brown which resonates with violent protesters like George Jackson during the civil rights and Vietnam War era in U.S. history.