The Transcendentalists and their World
In 1976, in time for the Bicentennial, Robert A. Gross’ The Minutemen and their World explored the social history of Concord, Mass., one of the American Revolution’s flashpoints. He’s been working on the sequel ever since. It arrived earlier this year as The Transcendentalists and their World.
The Transcendentalists were America’s first original philosophical movement, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and taken up by his young follower, Henry David Thoreau. Walden Pond was just down the road from Concord and the small New England town was also home to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. Now a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, Gross juggled statistics and mulled over newspapers, diaries, letters and other documents from Concord residents of the early 19th century to arrive at a social history of a small town of great importance.
The author counters the view, propagated by the Transcendentalists and repeated by historians, that Concord was bucolic and relatively untouched by the industrialization that had begun to transform New England by the time Thoreau camped out at Walden. The railroad had already linked Concord to its neighbors and “tied its fortunes to the rhythms of that ascendant urban-industrial world.” Gross unearths the stories of many Concord residents, yet it remains inescapable: the town is interesting largely for the influential writers and thinkers who lived there. Gross helps us understand their world.
