A third reason for the rise of Transcendentalism was the increasing interest in and availability of foreign literature and philosophy after 1800. Americans were traveling and studying in Europe, and some of them brought books back to America when they returned home. The Reverend Joseph Stevens Buckminster traveled to Europe in 1801, studied Biblical scholarship and European methods of Biblical interpretation, and returned home with about three thousand volumes purchased abroad. In 1815, George Ticknor and Edward Everett went to Europe to study. They traveled extensively, studied at the University of Göttingen in Germany (in 1817, Everett because the first American ever to receive a Ph.D. from Göttingen), and returned to America to take up important academic positions at Harvard (Ticknor taught foreign literature, Everett Greek). Emerson, significantly, was one of their students. Ticknor and Everett also brought back large numbers of books — Ticknor for his personal library, Everett for Harvard's library. Charles Follen, a German political refugee, was another influential Harvard teacher. In 1830, the first professor of German literature at Harvard, Follen was very familiar with the writings of Kant.
During this period, too, translations into English from European works began to make foreign thought and writing more available. The Reverend Moses Stuart, a professor at the Andover Theological Seminary, was translating grammars of Greek and Hebrew from German in the early nineteenth century. More significantly, in 1813, Madame de Stäel's De L'Allemagne was translated into English under the title Germany; a New York edition came out in 1814. (Madame de Stäel was a favorite writer of the Transcendentalists, and was seen as a kind of archetypal intellectual woman.)
