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From the eminent and award-winning historian Robert A. Gross comes his long-awaited, immersive journey through Concord in the age of Emerson and Thoreau, The Transcendentalists and Their World.One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of 2021Why Concord? How did a small and seemingly quiet village in the hinterlands of Boston become, by popular reckoning, the birthplace of two revolutions-the American War of Independence that began with shots fired by the local Minutemen, and the American Renaissance of literature and thought that began with the Transcendentalists' challenge to established pieties? In
The Transcendentalists and Their World, the distinguished historian Robert A. Gross gives a rich and beautifully detailed account of the town that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called home. Their Concord, he shows, was primed for revolt, and was hardly a sleepy, bucolic place fit only for poets and philosophers.
The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived in an age of transformation. A place of more than two thousand souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, one whose small, ordered society, founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen, was dramatically unsettled by the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy while the town became more tightly integrated with the wider world. These changes posed a challenge to a society built on inherited institutions and involuntary associations as citizens placed a new premium on autonomy and choice. Concord was ripe for Emerson and Thoreau.
The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a town and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the reaches of the universe for spiritual truths-and took stock of the rapidly changing contours of their surroundings. It shows us familiar literary figures alongside their neighbors-white and Black, devout and blasphemous, and situated at every level of the social order-and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community has been recovered so richly and located so meaningfully within the larger American story.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Part I: A Community in Change
1. A Day of Good Feelings
2. Community and Conscience
3. The White Village
4. The Curse of Trade
5. Husbandmen and Manufacturers
6. Knowledge Is Power
7. Internal Improvements
8. Privilege and Conspiracy
9. Freedom of Mind
Part II: Transcendentalists and Their World
10. A Little Democracy
11. The Philosopher of Modern History
12. Young Men and Women of Fairest Promise
13. The Man of Concord
14. Famine in the Churches
15. The Spirit of Reform
16. The Iron Horse
17. Walden and Beyond
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of
The Minutemen and Their World (1976), which won the Bancroft Prize;
Books and Libraries in Thoreau's Concord (1988); and
The Transcendentalists and Their World (2021). With Mary Kelley, he is the coeditor of
An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (2010). A former assistant editor of
Newsweek, he has written for such periodicals as
Esquire,
Harper's Magazine,
The Boston Globe, and
The New York Times, and his essays have appeared in
The American Scholar,
The New England Quarterly,
Raritan, and
The Yale Review.
A revised edition of Gross's influential
The Minutemen and Their World was published by Picador in 2022 in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.
