Download or read book Thoreau and His Harvard Classmates written by Harvard University. Class of 1837 and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Thoreau and His Harvard Classmates written by Harvard University. Class of 1837 and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Life of Henry David Thoreau written by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Thoreau in His Own Time written by Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forty-nine recollections gathered in Thoreau in His Own Time demonstrate that it was those who knew him personally, rather than his contemporary literati, who most prized Thoreau's message, but even those who disparaged him respected his unabashed example of an unconventional life. Included are comments by Ralph Waldo Emerson--friend, mentor, Walden landlord, and progenitor of the spin on Thoreau's posthumous reputation; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who could not compliment Thoreau without simultaneously denigrating him; and John Weiss, whose extended commentary on Thoreau's spirituality reflects unusual tolerance. Selections from the correspondence of Caroline Healey Dall, Maria Thoreau, Sophia Hawthorne, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Amanda Mather amplify our understanding of the ways in which nineteenth-century women viewed Thoreau. An excerpt by John Burroughs, who alternately honored and condemned Thoreau, asserts his view that Thoreau was ever searching for the unattainable.

Download or read book Henry David Thoreau written by Laura Dassow Walls and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls renews Henry David Thoreau for us in all his profound, inspiring complexity. Drawing on Thoreau's copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive, full of quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him. "The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.--Dust jacket.

Download or read book Thoreau His Home Friends and Books written by Annie Russell Marble and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau written by Joel Myerson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-30 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau is intended as an accessible guide to reading and understanding the works of Thoreau. Presenting essays by a distinguished array of contributors, the Companion is a valuable resource for historical and contextual material, whether on early writings like A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, on the monumental Walden, or on his assorted journals and later books. It also serves in some ways as a biographical guide, offering new insights into his turbulent publishing career, and his brief but extraordinarily original life. In short, the Companion helps the reader come to Thoreau's writings, as he would say, 'deliberately and reservedly' by suggesting how Thoreau uses language, how his biography informs his writing, how personal and historical influences shaped his career, and how his writings function as literary works.

Download or read book The Adventures of Henry Thoreau written by Michael Sims and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry David Thoreau has long been an intellectual icon and folk hero. In this strikingly original profile, Michael Sims reveals how the bookish, quirky young man who kept quitting jobs evolved into the patron saint of environmentalism and nonviolent activism. Working from nineteenth-century letters and diaries by Thoreau's family, friends, and students, Sims charts Henry's course from his time at Harvard through the years he spent living in a cabin beside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Sims uncovers a previously hidden Thoreau-the rowdy boy reminiscent of Tom Sawyer, the sarcastic college iconoclast, the devoted son who kept imitating his beloved older brother's choices in life. Thoreau was deeply influenced by his parents-his father owned a pencil factory in Concord, his mother was an abolitionist and social activist-and by Ralph Waldo Emerson, his frequent mentor. Sims relates intimate, telling moments in Thoreau's daily life-in Emerson's library; teaching his neighbor and friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to row a boat; exploring the natural world and Native American culture; tutoring Emerson's nephew on Staten Island and walking the streets of New York in the hope of launching a writing career. Returned from New York, Thoreau approached Emerson to ask if he could build a cabin on his mentor's land on the shores of Walden Pond, anticipating the isolation would galvanize his thoughts and actions. That it did. While at the cabin, he wrote his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and refined the journal entries that formed the core of Walden. Resisting what he felt were unfair taxes, he spent the night in jail that led to his celebrated essay “Civil Disobedience,” which would inspire the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Chronicling Thoreau's youthful transformation, Sims reveals how this decade would resonate over the rest of his life, and thereafter throughout American literature and history.

Download or read book Solid Seasons written by Jeffrey S. Cramer and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thoughtfully researched, movingly presented dual–biography of two iconic American writers, each trying to find the ideal friend with whom they could share their journey through our imperfect world. Any biography that concentrates on either Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson tends to diminish the other figure, but in Solid Seasons both men remain central and equal. Through several decades of writing, friendship remained a primary theme for them both. Collecting extracts from the letters and journals of both men, as well as words written about them by their contemporaries, Jeffrey S. Cramer beautifully illustrates the full nature of their twenty–five–year dialogue. Biographers like to point at the crisis in their friendship, focusing particularly on Thoreau's disappointment in Emerson—rarely on Emerson's own disappointment in Thoreau—and leaving it there, a friendship ruptured. But the solid seasons remained, as is evident when, in 1878, Anne Burrows Gilchrist, the English writer and friend of Whitman, visited Emerson. She wrote that his memory was failing "as to recent names and topics but as is usual in such cases all the mental impressions that were made when he was in full vigour remain clear and strong." As they chatted, Emerson called to his wife, Lidian, in the next room, "What was the name of my best friend?" "Henry Thoreau," she answered. "Oh, yes," Emerson repeated. "Henry Thoreau."

Download or read book Thoreau at 200 written by Kristen Case and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry David Thoreau's thinking about a number of ​issues - including the relationship between humans and other species, just responses to state violence, the threat posed to human freedom by industrial capitalism, and the essential relation between scientific 'facts' and poetic 'truths' - speaks to our historical moment as clearly as it did to the 'restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century' into which he was born. This volume, marking the two-hundredth anniversary of Thoreau's birth, gathers the threads of the contemporary, interdisciplinary conversation around this key figure in literary, political, philosophical, and environmental thought, uniting new essays by scholars who have shaped the field with chapters by emerging scholars investigating previously underexplored aspects of Thoreau's life, writings, and activities. Both a dispatch from the front lines of Thoreau scholarship and a vivid demonstration of Thoreau's relevance for twenty-first-century life and thought, Thoreau at 200 will be of interest for both Thoreau scholars and general readers.

Download or read book Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend Edward Waldo Emerson written by Edward Waldo Emerson and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Transcendentalists and Their World written by Robert A. Gross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

Download or read book Merit written by Joseph Kett and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that citizens' advancement should depend exclusively on merit, on qualities that deserve reward rather than on bloodlines or wire-pulling, was among the Founding ideals of the American republic, Joseph F. Kett argues in this provocative and engaging book. Merit's history, he contends, is best understood within the context of its often conflicting interaction with the other ideals of the Founding, equal rights and government by consent. Merit implies difference; equality suggests sameness. By sanctioning selection of those lower down by those higher up, merit potentially conflicts with the republican ideal that citizens consent to the decisions that affect their lives.In Merit, which traces the history of its subject over three centuries, Kett asserts that Americans have reconciled merit with other principles of the Founding in ways that have shaped their distinctive approach to the grading of public schools, report cards, the forging of workplace hierarchies, employee rating forms, merit systems in government, the selection of officers for the armed forces, and standardized testing for intelligence, character, and vocational interests. Today, the concept of merit is most commonly associated with measures by which it is quantified.Viewing their merit as an element of their selfhood—essential merit—members of the Founding generation showed no interest in quantitative measurements. Rather, they equated merit with an inner quality that accounted for their achievements and that was best measured by their reputations among their peers. In a republic based on equal rights and consent of the people, however, it became important to establish that merit-based rewards were within the grasp of ordinary Americans. In response, Americans embraced institutional merit in the form of procedures focused on drawing small distinctions among average people. They also developed a penchant for increasing the number of winners in competitions—what Kett calls "selection in" rather than "selection out"—in order to satisfy popular aspirations. Kett argues that values rooted in the Founding of the republic continue to influence Americans’ approach to controversies, including those surrounding affirmative action, which involve the ideal of merit.

Download or read book Merit written by Joseph F. Kett and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that citizens' advancement should depend exclusively on merit, on qualities that deserve reward rather than on bloodlines or wire-pulling, was among the Founding ideals of the American republic, Joseph F. Kett argues in this provocative and engaging book. Merit's history, he contends, is best understood within the context of its often conflicting interaction with the other ideals of the Founding, equal rights and government by consent. Merit implies difference; equality suggests sameness. By sanctioning selection of those lower down by those higher up, merit potentially conflicts with the republican ideal that citizens consent to the decisions that affect their lives. In Merit, which traces the history of its subject over three centuries, Kett asserts that Americans have reconciled merit with other principles of the Founding in ways that have shaped their distinctive approach to the grading of public schools, report cards, the forging of workplace hierarchies, employee rating forms, merit systems in government, the selection of officers for the armed forces, and standardized testing for intelligence, character, and vocational interests. Today, the concept of merit is most commonly associated with measures by which it is quantified. Viewing their merit as an element of their selfhood-essential merit-members of the Founding generation showed no interest in quantitative measurements. Rather, they equated merit with an inner quality that accounted for their achievements and that was best measured by their reputations among their peers. In a republic based on equal rights and consent of the people, however, it became important to establish that merit-based rewards were within the grasp of ordinary Americans. In response, Americans embraced institutional merit in the form of procedures focused on drawing small distinctions among average people. They also developed a penchant for increasing the number of winners in competitions-what Kett calls "selection in" rather than "selection out"-in order to satisfy popular aspirations. Kett argues that values rooted in the Founding of the republic continue to influence Americans' approach to controversies, including those surrounding affirmative action, which involve the ideal of merit.

Download or read book Walden written by Henry David Thoreau and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Encyclopedia of the U S Government and the Environment 2 volumes written by Matthew J. Lindstrom and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-21 with total page 1004 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely, new resource on the history of the U.S. government's approach to environmental policy. At a time when changing the nation's environmental policy is a top presidential priority, with a new global climate change treaty deep in negotiations, and with the country itself weighing the need for action against concerns over too much government regulation, this exhaustive new reference work could not be more welcomed. Encyclopedia of the U.S. Government and the Environment: History, Policy, and Politics explores the interaction between the federal government and environmental politics and policy throughout the nation's history, from the earliest efforts to preserve lands and regulate pollution to the 1960s emergence of the modern environmental movement, the landmark legislation of the 1970s, and the seesawing back-and-forth of policies between alternating Republican and Democrat administrations of the last three decades. Authoritative, unbiased, and informed by the latest available research, the hundreds of entries cover the full range of issues, events, laws, institutions, and key players that shape federal environmental policies, incorporating viewpoints from across the ideological spectrum.

Download or read book America Goes Green 3 volumes written by Kim Kennedy White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 1358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-volume encyclopedia explores the evolution of green ideology and eco-friendly practices in contemporary American culture, ranging from the creation of regional and national guidelines for green living to the publication of an increasing number of environmental blogs written from the layperson's perspective. Evidence of humanity's detrimental impact on the environment is mounting. As Americans, we are confronted daily with news stories, blogs, and social media commentary about the necessity of practicing green behaviors to offset environmental damage. This essential reference is a fascinating review of the issues surrounding green living, including the impact of this lifestyle on Americans' time and money, the information needed to adhere to green principles in the 21st century, and case studies and examples of successful implementation. America Goes Green: An Encyclopedia of Eco-Friendly Culture in the United States examines this gripping topic through 3 volumes organized by A–Z entries across 11 themes; state-by-state essays grouped by region; and references including primary source documents, bibliography, glossary, and green resources. This timely encyclopedia explores the development of an eco-friendly culture in America, and entries present the debates, viewpoints, and challenges of green living.