Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Author: Laura Dassow Walls

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-07-07

Total Pages: 668

ISBN-13: 022634469X

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"[The author] traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and 'America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.' By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated? Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, [the author] presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him."--


The Transcendentalists and Their World

The Transcendentalists and Their World

Author: Robert A. Gross

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 493

ISBN-13: 0374711887

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One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. 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 and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. 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. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.


An Observant Eye

An Observant Eye

Author: David F. Wood

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13:

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This book has a two-part purpose. The first is to make the Concord Museum's unique collection of objects related to Henry Thoreau and his family better known. Many details of Thoreau's everyday life in Concord can be discerned in these objects, and for this reason alone they are well worth study. The second purpose is to explore the role that objects - including some of these very objects - played in Thoreau's intellectual life. This might, at first, seem like a contradiction; why should a self-proclaimed idealist care about objects at all? But Thoreau did care about objects, and paid a close and particular attention to them. He was distinctively aware of the ability objects have to communicate. In this, as in his approach to natural history, his thinking is remarkably current. -- Introduction.


The Concord Quartet

The Concord Quartet

Author: Samuel Agnew Schreiner

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2006-08-04

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," 1837 From the start of transcendentalism and America's intellectual renaissance in the 1830s, to the Civil War and beyond, the story of four extraordinary friends whose lives shaped a nation "Beginning in the 1830s, coincidences that seem almost miraculous in retrospect brought together in Concord as friends and neighbors four men of very different temperaments and talents who shared the same conviction that the soul had 'inherent power to grasp the truth' and that the truth would make men free of old constraints on thought and behavior. In addition to Emerson, a philosopher, there was Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator; Henry David Thoreau, a naturalist and rebel; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novelist. This book is the story of that unique and influential friendship in action, of the lives the friends led, and their work that resulted in an enduring change in their nation's direction." --From the Prologue


Walden

Walden

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Publisher:

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13:

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On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: This is Thoreau's classic protest against government's interference with individual liberty. One of the most famous essays ever written, it came to the attention of Gandhi and formed the basis for his passive resistance movement.


American Treasures

American Treasures

Author:

Publisher: Rizzoli Publications

Published: 2017-04-25

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0847859614

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The first book to celebrate the dramatic Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, setting and renowned art collection of the Brandywine River Museum of Art and its historic homes, studios, and sites relating to three generations of the Wyeth family. The Brandywine River Museum of Art is home to one of the country’s renowned collections of American art. This stunning book reveals the beauty of the museum’s remarkable holdings, housed in a renovated nineteenth-century mill building with a steel- and-glass addition overlooking the Brandywine River, and of its three historic properties—the N. C. Wyeth home and studio, the Andrew Wyeth studio, and the Kuerner Farm, which inspired over 1,000 works by Andrew Wyeth—all National Historic Landmarks. This volume features fifty of the museum’s most beloved paintings, by artists such as John Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, William Trost Richards, Horace Pippin, and Andrew Wyeth, along with immersive photographs of the 300-acre landscape surrounding the museum and historic structures. The introduction by curator Christine Podmaniczky includes a brief history of this unique institution, its art collection, and the intimate places where the Wyeth family lived and painted. This handsome volume will appeal not only to museum visitors but also to art lovers everywhere.


The Minutemen and Their World

The Minutemen and Their World

Author: Robert A. Gross

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2011-04-01

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0374706395

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The Bancroft Prize–winning classic of American history now in a revised and expanded edition with a new preface and afterword by the author. On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The “shot heard round the world” catapulted this sleepy New England town into the height of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The town—future home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne—soon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert A. Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.


The Great Mental Models, Volume 1

The Great Mental Models, Volume 1

Author: Shane Parrish

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0593719972

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Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.


The Maine Woods

The Maine Woods

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Publisher: anboco

Published: 2016-09-01

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 3736412649

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The Maine Woods was the second volume collected from his writings after Thoreau's death. Of the material which composed it, the first two divisions were already in print. "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods" was the title of a paper printed in 1848 in The Union Magazine, and "Chesuncook" was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1858. The book was edited by his friend William Ellery Channing. It was during his second summer at Walden that Thoreau made his first visit to the Maine woods. It was probably in response to a request from Horace Greeley that he wrote out the narrative from his journal, for Mr. Greeley had shown himself eager to help Thoreau in putting his wares on the market. In a letter to Emerson, January 12, 1848, Thoreau writes: "I read a part of the story of my excursion to Ktaadn to quite a large audience of men and boys, the other night, whom it interested. It contains many facts and some poetry." He offered the paper to Greeley at the end of March, and on the 17th of April Greeley responded: "I inclose you $25 for your article on Maine scenery, as promised. I know it is worth more, though I have not yet found time to read it; but I have tried once to sell it without success. It is rather long for my columns, and too fine for the million; but I consider it a cheap bargain, and shall print it myself if I do not dispose of it to better advantage. You will not, of course, consider yourself x under any sort of obligation to me, for my offer was in the way of business, and I have got more than the worth of my money." But this generous, high-minded friend was thinking of Thoreau's business, not his own, for in October of the same year he writes, "I break a silence of some duration to inform you that I hope on Monday to receive payment for your glorious account of 'Ktaadn and the Maine Woods,' which I bought of you at a Jew's bargain and sold to The Union Magazine...