* After the Civil War, one of Emerson’s African American contemporaries in letters, William Wells Brown (1814–84), in The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Achievements of the Colored Race (1874), described early northern Europeans in terms reminiscent of those of both Herodotus and David Walker: “See them in the gloomy forests of Germany, sacrificing to their grim and gory idols; drinking the warm blood of their prisoners, quaffing libations from human skulls; infesting the shores of the Baltic for plunder and robbery; bringing home the reeking scalps of enemies as an offering to their king.”