Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau's time at Walden Pond has provided substantial data for scientists monitoring the effects of a warming climate on the area's plant life.

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

Why do the Transcendentalists still have an outsize influence on American culture?

Decades before Thoreau's famous experiment, a community of formerly enslaved men and women had a much different experience of life in the woods.

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.

How Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, caught on in tight-knit Concord, Massachusetts.

It’s time to fight for the original and heretofore unachieved goals of the women’s movement.

How a Los Angeles Times editor helped create the myth of the American West.

The dangers of confusing self-improvement with institutional change.

A new book argues that Darwin failed to capture the American imagination because of the untimely death of Henry David Thoreau.

A new history of New York City during World War II captures the glory, tawdriness, poverty, narcissism, beauty, and grime of this “aggregation of villages.”

The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century remade how Americans engaged with the world.

On Jean Craighead George’s most famous book, Walden’s legacy, and the dream of togetherness.

Despite the recent backlash against DEI, there is a longstanding tradition of virtue capitalism in the United States.

French Canadians held a distinct position in an American labor landscape in which experts viewed different “races” as being suited to different kinds of work.

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit.

The long history and contemporary relevance of war tax resistance.

L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is productively understood in terms of this widespread fight over the value of fire and the shape of capitalism.

Ever since Thoreau headed to Walden, our attention has been wandering.