Henry David Thoreau

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

The story of Swami Vivekananda and his time in America.

A new book explores the final days of Ralph Waldo Emerson - traveling from Concord to California, and beyond.

Wetlands absorb carbon dioxide and buffer the excesses of drought and flood, yet we’ve drained much of this land. Can we learn to love our swamps?

John Brown and the historical novel.

Why have historians overlooked the connections between abolitionism and the famous New England cultural movement?

The plant explorers of the USDA succeeded in bringing the world’s fruits to American supermarkets. But at what human, ecological, and gustatory cost?

For more than a century, U.S. wars of invasion have claimed a humanitarian mantle.

Traditional environmentalism has lacked a meaningful, practical democratic vision, rendering it largely marginal to the day-to-day lives of most Americans.

Notes toward a history of isolation.

Exploring the follicular politics of gender, race, and poetics in the revisionist fantasy television series Dickinson.

Historical narratives of the United States have never not been shaped by an anxiety about the end of it all. Are we a new Rome or a new Zion?

Lincoln protected thousands of acres of California forest and wanted to restore the nation’s battle-ravaged countryside before he was assassinated.

William James, Charles Peirce, and the questions that roiled them.

The righteous rage of John Brown.

In Jill Lepore's "These Truths," ideas produce other ideas. But new ideas arise from thinking humans, not from other ideas.

Du Bois's ideas about the environment — and how Jim Crow shaped them — have gone relatively unnoticed by environmental historians.

Susan Fenimore Cooper is now being recognized as one of the nation's first environmentalists.

Hannah Duston was used as a national symbol of innocence, valor, and patriotism to justify westward expansion.

Why do people hike?