Ralph Waldo Emmerson goes hat shopping

In this Althistory, Ralph Waldo Emmerson wakes up on the morning of April 12, 1849 to find a disturbing crease in his bangs and decides that the most prudent of solutions is to visit his local Bostontonian Hatshop.

No self-reliance
It was on this day that, had he not been gallavanting around Backbay tossing about bowlers like a foppish Lincoln, he would have spent the day pensively staring out of his office window whereby he would have constructed the basic argument of his seminal prose work "on self-reliance"

Transcendentalism safe
Fortunately, his subsequent choice of a black shiny velvet tophat would in no way hinder his later forays into the pseudo-spiritual American mysticism movement. As a side note, In another Althistory Walt Whitman idles too long at a habberdasher and leaves of grass is never published. A more gothic-romantic book of poetry is instead published, entitled "rows of buttons".