This session will feature The Transcendentalists and Their World, Robert Gross’s long-awaited study of Concord in the era of Emerson and Thoreau. Why 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, historian Robert 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, hardly a sleepy, bucolic place fit only for poets and philosophers.
