Join historian Augustine Sedgewick in conversation with Robert A. Gross, author of Transcendentalists and Their World, for a deep dive into the history of the Thoreau family’s pencil manufacturing business. A story of environmental history and material culture, Thoreau’s pencils bring us to Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida where enslaved people harvested red cedar and to Concord where an engineering Thoreau worked to improve his family’s business. What do these pencils reveal to us about the Thoreau who we know so well? Co-Sponsored by the Thoreau Society.