On 11 September 1893, Swami Vivekananda, a disciple of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, rose to address the World's Parliament of Religions, an interfaith gathering held in Chicago alongside the World's Columbian Exposition. Vivekananda had traveled to the United States without an official denominational sponsor and had to secure his place at the Parliament through sympathetic academic contacts. His opening words, Sisters and brothers of America, are reported to have drawn a lengthy standing ovation from an audience of several thousand, before he had said anything else.
In his address and the further talks he gave during the Parliament's two week session, Vivekananda presented Vedanta, the philosophical tradition rooted in the Upanishads, as a religion of universal tolerance, arguing that Hinduism had always accepted the validity of other paths to the same truth. He criticized sectarian intolerance in general terms, while presenting Hindu philosophy as intellectually serious and spiritually mature to an American audience whose prior exposure to Hinduism had often come through hostile missionary accounts.
The Parliament made Vivekananda a public figure in the United States almost overnight, and he spent much of the following three years lecturing across America and Europe, founding Vedanta societies that continue to operate today, before returning to India in 1897 to found the Ramakrishna Mission.