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Detail of landscape painting Villa Menaggio, Lago di Como by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne.

Transcending the Glass Ceiling

Five women who made important contributions to 19th-century American philosophy finally get their due.
by Lydia Moland via The American Scholar on March 27, 2025
Black and white portrait of Jones Very

The Voice of Unfiltered Spirit

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.
by Brenda Wineapple via New York Review of Books on January 18, 2024
Watercolor portrait of Bronson Alcott, a 19th century American philosopher and educator.

New England Ecstasies

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.
by Brenda Wineapple via New York Review of Books on February 16, 2022
A political cartoon in which a king sitting on a litter carried by enslaved men rests his elbow on three skulls labeled Fugitive Slave Bill.

Transcendentalists Against Slavery

Why have historians overlooked the connections between abolitionism and the famous New England cultural movement?
by Peter Wirzbicki, David Moore via Mere Orthodoxy on February 9, 2022
Collage of nature images and transcendentalists' faces, with flowers in Emerson's eyes.

Emerson and Thoreau’s Fanatical Freedom

Why do the Transcendentalists still have an outsize influence on American culture?
by Sarah Blackwood via The New Republic on January 6, 2022
A colorful bird and landscape sketched within the shape of a man's head.

Emerson Didn’t Practice the Self-Reliance He Preached

How Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, caught on in tight-knit Concord, Massachusetts.
by Mark Greif via The Atlantic on November 9, 2021

Ralph Waldo Emerson Meets His Spirit Animal

Some Americans who have lost faith in traditional institutions are finding spirituality in this Denver church—and in themselves.
by Molly Worthen via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on September 19, 2024
Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1857.

The Essential Emerson

The latest biography of the great transcendentalist captures the paradoxes of his Yankee mind.
by Allen Mendenhall via Law & Liberty on June 21, 2024
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Glad to the Brink of Fear

A new biography reveals how Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Americans a vocabulary to understand themselves in an era even more tempestuous than our own.
by Nicole Penn via American Purpose on March 13, 2024
Cover image from the first edition of Thoreau’s Walden
original

The Book Read ‘Round the World

Literary history is packed into Concord’s “Old Manse,” but the tiny abode of Walden’s author proves the highlight of our New England trip.
by Ed Ayers on June 23, 2023
The ‘Grizzly Giant’ sequoia tree in Mariposa Grove, Yosemite, California.

Emerson & His ‘Big Brethren’

A new book explores the final days of Ralph Waldo Emerson - traveling from Concord to California, and beyond.
by Christopher Benfey via New York Review of Books on September 29, 2022
Illustration of Henry David Thoreau and Lidian Emerson looking into each other's eyes

Thoreau in Love

The writer had a deep bond with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he also had a profound connection with Emerson’s wife.
by James Marcus via The New Yorker on October 11, 2021

The Revolutionary Thoreau

Generations of readers have chosen to emphasize Thoreau's spiritual communion with Nature, but Walden begins with trenchant critique of “progress.”
by R. H. Lossin via New York Review of Books on September 4, 2020
Photo of two men

The Renegade Ideas Behind the Rise of American Pragmatism

William James, Charles Peirce, and the questions that roiled them.
by John Kaag, Douglas Anderson via Literary Hub on January 9, 2020
Photos of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller

The Conflicted Love Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller

How an intense unclassifiable relationship shaped the history of modern thought.
by Maria Popova via The Marginalian on June 5, 2019

'Walden' Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece

In his 2-million-word journal, the transcendentalist balanced poetic wonder and scientific rigor as he explored the natural world.
by Andrea Wulf via The Atlantic on November 1, 2017
Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau: A Radical for All Seasons

The surprising persistence of Henry David Thoreau.
by Jedediah Britton-Purdy via The Nation on June 1, 2017
Black and white photograph of a lake.

Not So Close

For Henry David Thoreau, it is only as strangers that we can see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are.
by Ashley C. Barnes via Commonweal on March 18, 2025
Illustration of Ives seen as an American counterpart to Mahler.

Charles Ives, Connoisseur of Chaos

Celebrating the composer’s 150th birthday, at a festival in Bloomington, Indiana.
by Alex Ross via The New Yorker on November 4, 2024
A drawing of a bust of Abraham Lincoln sitting on philosophy books.

From Königsberg to Gettysburg

How German Enlightenment thought influenced Abraham Lincoln.
by Allen C. Guelzo via Claremont Review of Books on June 15, 2024
A house and people from the American frontier.

The Wild Blood Dynasty

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit.
by Adam Begley via The Atlantic on May 14, 2024

The Men Who Started the War

John Brown and the Secret Six—the abolitionists who funded the raid on Harpers Ferry—confronted a question as old as America: When is violence justified?
by Drew Gilpin Faust via The Atlantic on November 13, 2023
Books "Three Roads Back" and "Henry David Thoreau."

To Walden

Two new books attempt to grasp Thoreau’s seeming contradictions without reconciling them too easily.
by Todd Shy via Los Angeles Review of Books on November 7, 2023
Collage of summer camp, toasting marshmallows, swimming, boating, camping, trees, and wildflowers.

The Life Lessons of Summer Camp

A few weeks in the woods have taught kids to face new situations, make their way among strangers, solve their own problems—and live a more authentic life.
by Rich Cohen via The Wall Street Journal on July 8, 2022
Collage of photo of geologist Ellen Sewall Osgood and rock crystals.

In 19th-Century New England, This Amateur Geologist Created Her Own Cabinet of Curiosities

A friend of Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sewall Osgood's pursuit of her scientific passion illuminates the limits and possibilities placed on the era's women.
by Reed Gochberg via Smithsonian on November 19, 2021

Ralph Waldo Emerson Would Really Hate Your Twitter Feed

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, political activism was full of empty gestures done in bad faith. Abolition called for true heroism.
by Peter Wirzbicki via Psyche on August 9, 2021
A church building situated amongst mountains.

Thoreau In Good Faith

A literary examination of Henry David Thoreau's life and legacy today.
by Caleb Smith via Public Books on July 19, 2021
A diagram of the phases of the Moon.

Man-Bat and Raven: Poe on the Moon

A new book recovers the reputation Poe had in his own lifetime of being a cross between a science writer, a poet, and a man of letters.
by Mike Jay via London Review of Books on June 24, 2021
A collage featuring Thomas Jefferson and passages cut from the Bible.

What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus

Jefferson revised the Gospels to make Jesus more reasonable, and lost the power of his story.
by Vinson Cunningham via The New Yorker on December 28, 2020
Wolfgang van Beethoven.

How Young America Came to Love Beethoven

On the 250th anniversary of the famous composer’s birth, the story of how his music first took hold across the Atlantic.
by Nora McGreevy via Smithsonian on December 16, 2020
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