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Minute man statue

Myth, Memory, and the Question of the Minute Man Statue

How the Minute Man statue may be used to perpetuate the idea of patriotism in times of conflict.
by Elise Lemire via The Dial: A Journal Of The Emerson Society on November 14, 2024
A collection of ninteenth-century manuscripts on top of a library table.

Fighting Words: The Pamphlets of a Democratic Revolution

To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.
by Robert A. Gross via Commonplace on September 19, 2023
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
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
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
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

Before Parkland, Santa Fe and Columbine…There Was Concord High

In 1985, a 16-year-old dropout showed up to school with a shotgun. Everyone said it was just a fluke.
by Natalia Megas via Narratively on May 23, 2018
Walden Pond through the trees.

Darwin's Early Adopters

A new book argues that Darwin failed to capture the American imagination because of the untimely death of Henry David Thoreau.
by John Hay via Public Books on April 5, 2017
Painting of Troops, an American Flag and Eagle.

Echoes of Lexington and Concord

The 250th anniversary of "the shot heard round the world" is a reminder of the rights the Patriots fought for.
by Richard Alan Ryerson via Law & Liberty on April 1, 2025
Painting titled "Repulse of Leslie at the North Bridge".

Was This Little-Known Standoff the Real Start of the American Revolution?

On February 26, 1775, residents of Salem, Massachusetts, banded together to force the British to withdraw from their town in Leslie’s Retreat.
by Robert Pushkar via Smithsonian on February 26, 2025
Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust in 2009.

The Bleak, All But-Forgotten World of Segregated Virginia

Former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s extraordinary memoir recalls painful memories for her--and me.
by Garrett Epps via Washington Monthly on November 8, 2023
A boulder marks the location where Brister Freeman’s house is thought to have stood.

Black People Lived in Walden Woods Long Before Henry David Thoreau

Decades before Thoreau's famous experiment, a community of formerly enslaved men and women had a much different experience of life in the woods.
by Sydney Trent via Retropolis on November 28, 2021
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

The True American

A review on the many publications about Henry David Thoreau's life for the bicentennial anniversary of his birthday.
by Robert Pogue Harrison via New York Review of Books on August 17, 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

How Margaret Fuller Set Minds on Fire

High-minded and scandal-prone, a foe of marriage who dreamed of domesticity, Fuller radiated a charisma that helped ignite the fight for women’s rights.
by James Marcus via The New Yorker on June 2, 2025
Revolutionary War reenactors near Lexington, Massachusetts.

The King We Overthrew — and the King Some Now Want

Americans need to reconnect with their innate dislike of arbitrary rule.
by Philip Bump via Washington Post on April 17, 2025
A monument of the Minutemen line in Concord, Massachusetts.
partner

The Dangerous Afterlives of Lexington and Concord

How a myth about farmers taking on the British has fueled more than two centuries of exclusionary nationalism.
by Eran A. Zelnik via HNN on April 15, 2025
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
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
Arlington County Board Chair Katie Cristol hears from citizens at a board meeting in November. The attendees were demanding more affordable housing in Arlington, Va.
partner

The Battle of the Suburbs is Back. Will It End Differently?

The lessons of the past for suburban affordable housing advocates.
by Lily Geismer via Made By History on April 25, 2023
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
An effigy of Richard Nixon with a distorted papier-mache head.

The People’s Bicentennial Commission and the Spirit of (19)76

The Left once tried to own the legacy of America’s Bicentennial, but ran into ideological and structural roadblocks all too familiar today.
by Jason Tebbe via Tropics of Meta on July 26, 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

From the Battlefield to 'Little Women'

How Louisa May Alcott found a niche in observing the world around her.
by Jennifer Wilson via New York Review of Books on August 28, 2019

Wild Thing: A New Biography of Thoreau

Freeing Thoreau from layers of caricature that have long distorted his legacy.
by Daegan Miller via Los Angeles Review of Books on July 16, 2017
A broken pencil lays on top of a standardized testing answer sheet
partner

What Today’s Education Reformers Can Learn From Henry David Thoreau

Snobbish elitism will hurt their cause.
by Jonathan Zimmerman via Made By History on July 12, 2017

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