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In recent journal entries, we created a beachhead surrounding Napoleon, remarking on his playing The Turk, ostensibly a chess playing machine (count Babbage a skeptic). Omni-triangulating from there, you might move laterally around the earth, as we have been doing, from Eurasia to the Americas, and/or forwards and backwards through time. 

Rolling forward, we come to Margaret Fuller, who, like Ada (student of the Babbage engine), was another polymath, though perhaps with less interest in math per se. Ada liked Bernoulli numbers. 

Fuller was surrounded by the Romantics (mostly men), who felt mostly repulsed by industrialization and its psychological costs. A free thinking woman, on the other hand, might anticipate better times ahead, once they were finally made equals to men, in terms of privileges and power. 

Industrialization could liberate them from onerous tasks, even if men were making a mess of it all with their unchecked egos and susceptibility to alcohol.

Margaret was educated by her father, but had that built-in love of learning that, once accelerated, kept its inertia, such that she could make it her economic lifeline and not marry early. She kept to scholarship and entered male academic society as a fellow bachelor, as literary magazine editor and proverbial single woman in a big city newspaper columnist, head for fame as an international correspondent, for the New York Herald Tribune (run by Greeley).

The overseas chapter was catalyzed by a Quaker couple, who wanted her to serve as au pair for their kid. Some of the highbrow learning might rub off. They would travel Europe together, including Italy, and Italy is where she decided to resign her au pair job and fall in love with Ossoli. 

By this time she was already a fan the Revolution going on, for an integrated place called Italy, versus a patchwork of vassal states (of Spain, of Austria) with Papal Lands around Rome. Germanic states were in a similar mood: to unify as Germany, which they (the nationalists) wanted to include Prussia (and yet the King of Prussia refused their offered "gutter crown" in one scene). 

What was at most at stake in these times, from a Transcendentalist viewpoint, was:

1. the present and future role of slavery; the USA was expanding and the anti-slavery activists wanted to make sure slavery, as an institution, did not continue to grow as the USA did (they wanted the practice contained and preferably abolished).
   
   
2. the present and future role of women; all this talk of freeing the underclasses and expanding voting rights to the masses was reminding women they were an underclass too, deserving voting rights as much as anyone
   
   
3. the present and future role of nobility; shorthand for the role of class (a focus of Marxism), with a landed aristocracy distinct from capitalizing industrialists, with organizing (unionizing) workers, and peasants resisting (as in ending) feudalism while contemplating various kinds of land reform
   
   
4. developing egalitarian relationships with Native Americans, anti-imperialist values

To quote Terry Bristol, a promulgator and champion of engineeringly based thinking, the key question, then and now, as always, is "how shall we live?".

My tendency as a Quaker is to remember John Cadbury (1801 - 1889) and also Robert Owen (1771 - 1858), not a Quaker, for their company town utopianism, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism featuring ownership by workers and shared institutional wealth. My university ideal likewise has that company town aspect, with work-study trajectories and student-faculty (4D brand?) housing around the world.

Margaret Fuller and her Transcendentalists proved that a middle class or "bourgeois intelligentsia" could be both radical and instrumental. "Middle" means "in the midst of" i.e. where memes mingle from other social classes, above and below (or we might talk about subcultures, or cults), including religious and military hierarchies.  

Studies of any middle class might start with their social organizations, be that synagogue, mosque, temple, church or what have you. Girl Scouts? Rotary Club? Therapy sessions? White collar work and organized crime have a long history together too. We use a lot of fictionalized TV shows to show ourselves these partially overlapping scenarios (e.g. Breaking Bad), with screenwriters tasked with keeping it at once both real, and entertaining.

Transcendentalists were into self empowerment. Once God was "within" as a Unity (versus "out there" as some Trinity), why not explore and introspect as a way of discovering divinity, meaning one's own potential as a human.  No More Secondhand God, by Margaret's grand nephew, would propagate this doctrine or attitude forward. The idea of self betterment, of working on oneself, would echo forward through the Work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (and Maurice Nicoll).

Bucky delved into his great aunt's corpus once at Harvard and picked up on her "better times ahead" attitude. She, like Emerson, anticipated a post-Romantic more purely American mindset that embraced technology in a way that didn't at the same time deny nature, as these would become one and the same in the new American philosophy. Was this Pragmatism? Are we talking philosophy or architecture?

That's how her grand nephew saw himself, as fulfilling her prophetic hopes, living up to her expectations as a poet of the industrial era. He did not see his own work as entirely derivative of anything European, e.g. the Bauhaus school.