The Transcendentalists and Their World

Name: The Transcendentalists and Their World
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Robert A. Gross
ISBN: 9781666142860

Author: Robert A. Gross

Narrator: Paul Brion

Unabridged: 26 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/26/2022

Categories: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Movements, History, Us History

Synopsis

The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers.

The Transcendentalists lived through a transformative epoch of American life. Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society was unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice.

The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works.

About Robert A. Gross

Robert A. Gross is the Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Books and Libraries in Thoreau's Concord and editor of In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael

This is a masterpiece. Gross has been researching, studying and analyzing the pre-Civil War history of Concord, Massachusetts for over 50 years. His 1976 book, "The Minutemen and Their World" is a classic. This is his magnum opus on Concord. The first half of this pleasingly long book is a detailed......more

Goodreads review by Greg

I sit at my computer both to praise Mr. Gross for this tremendous, in-depth – and by “in-depth” I mean really in-depth – look at Concord and its environs in the first part of the 19th century but also to advise/warn would-be readers that this amazing piece of scholarship is not the best place for so......more

Goodreads review by Bob

Emphasis on “their world,” meaning Concord, Massachusetts in the first half of the nineteenth century. You will learn tons about manufacturing “the common pencil,” the family business that bored the shit out of Henry David Thoreau. Agricultural and educational reform. Industrialization and railroads......more

Goodreads review by Thomas

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this fantastic work. This was such a treat! Perhaps, unexpected but I really enjoyed this. The story of Concord, MA, Emerson, and Thoreau. I learned a ton from this excellent history. The topic may not be one that people will immediately jump at - but I would highly......more

Goodreads review by Dave

Interesting book. More about the history of Concord, MA than about the Transcendentalists. Frankly, I am glad of that. It is extremely well researched.......more