Professor Kate Culkin will discuss her new book, Emerson’s Daughters - Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press, July 2025). She will focus on the critical role the manuscript holdings of the Concord Free Public Library's William Munroe Special Collections played in her ability to write the book. Emerson’s Daughters is a biography of a sisterhood, the first full-length study of Ellen and Edith’s lives. Building on archival research into the extensive correspondence between the sisters, it adds to the growing body of work on women’s contribution to Transcendentalism while opening a window onto the rich and understudied family life of the “Sage of Concord.” Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes, the daughters of Lidian Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, grew up in the heart of Concord, Massachusetts’s famed literary community. In a culture that celebrated self-reliance, Ellen and Edith formed a partnership that only strengthened as their paths diverged, with Ellen remaining in the family home and Edith marrying William Forbes, moving to Milton, Massachusetts, and having eight children. The partnership allowed them to tend to the demands and opportunities created by their father’s career, including serving as his secretaries and editors and helped them shape his posthumous image. It also enabled them to adapt to historical developments stretching from the Civil War to American imperialism and personal ones, including Edith’s growing family and travel and study abroad, as well as inevitable ones brought on by the aging processes of their parents and themselves. Kate Culkin is a Professor of History at Bronx Community College. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American women, memorialization, and the role of e-portfolios in teaching and learning.