Download or read book Thoreau s Country written by David R. Foster and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks through nineteenth-century Concord were those of rolling farmland, small woodlands, and farmers endlessly working the land. As Foster explored the New England landscape, he discovered ancient ruins of cellar holes, stone walls, and abandoned cartways--all remnants of this earlier land now largely covered by forest. How had Thoreau's open countryside, shaped by ax and plough, divided by fences and laneways, become a forested landscape? Part ecological and historical puzzle, this book brings a vanished countryside to life in all its dimensions, human and natural, offering a rich record of human imprint upon the land. Extensive excerpts from the journals show us, through the vividly recorded details of daily life, a Thoreau intimately acquainted with the ways in which he and his neighbors were changing and remaking the New England landscape. Foster adds the perspective of a modern forest ecologist and landscape historian, using the journals to trace themes of historical and social change. Thoreau's journals evoke not a wilderness retreat but the emotions and natural history that come from an old and humanized landscape. It is with a new understanding of the human role in shaping that landscape, Foster argues, that we can best prepare ourselves to appreciate and conserve it today. From the journal: "I have collected and split up now quite a pile of driftwood--rails and riders and stems and stumps of trees--perhaps half or three quarters of a tree...Each stick I deal with has a history, and I read it as I am handling it, and, last of all, I remember my adventures in getting it, while it is burning in the winter evening. That is the most interesting part of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge, perchance, or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the marks of fire on it...Thus one half of the value of my wood is enjoyed before it is housed, and the other half is equal to the whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which I buy." --October 20, 1855
Download or read book The Wildest Country written by J. Parker Huber and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Civil Disobedience written by Henry David Thoreau and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience in 1849. It argues the superiority of the individual conscience over acquiescence to government. Thoreau was inspired to write in response to slavery and the Mexican-American war. He believed that people could not be made agents of injustice if they were governed by their own consciences.
Download or read book Thoreau on Land written by Henry David Thoreau and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2001 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spirit of Thoreau series is a fresh new collection of Thoreau's best writing and thinking on various themes, drawn from both unpublished and published sources. THOREAU ON LAND NATURE'S CANVAS Edited by Joseph Valentine This elegant volume chronicles Thoreau's fascination with nature, from his well-known reflections on Walden to an unexpected meeting with loggers in the woods: "No doubt our employment is more alike than we suspect, and we are each serving the great Master's needs more than our own." He shows a Thoreau much broader in his interests and sympathies than most of us imagine.
Download or read book Thoreau the Land Surveyor written by Patrick Chura and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An insightful study of how Thoreau's profession as a surveyor impacts his environmental sensibility and informs his literary works; further, Chura shows that the manuscript surveys and corresponding field notes are themselves worthy of literary analysis. "--Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, coeditor of More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-first Century "Chura's thorough understanding of the cultural import and physical practice of 19th-century surveying provides a fresh and interesting perspective on Thoreau's life and works. . . . .He combines a spry writing style with meticulous research in this delightful book, which introduces readers to another side of Thoreau's life and thought. Highly recommended." --G. D. MacDonald, Virginia State University "Most books about Henry David Thoreau focus on his writing, philosophy, or literary vision, paying little attention to how he made a living while engaged in such transcendentalist pursuits. In Thoreau the Land Surveyor, Patrick Chura corrects this oversight." --Lorianne DiSabato, The New England Quarterly "A scholarly book that's as beautiful as it is unput-downable. . . Not only is Chura a fine writer here, he is one heck of a historian. He enriches every page with carefully considered research. . . .I loved this book from start to finish." --Mike Tidwell, author of The Ponds of Kalambayi: An African Sojourn. "An insightful study of how Thoreau's profession as a surveyor impacts his environmental sensibility and informs his literary works; further, Chura shows that the manuscript surveys and corresponding field notes are themselves worthy of literary analysis. "This book on the significance of land surveying to Henry Thoreau's writing is one that we have long needed. Chura's practical experience as a surveyor combined with his literary scholarship makes him the perfect person to write it."--Richard J. Schneider, editor ofHenry David Thoreau: A Documentary Volume Henry David Thoreau, one of America's most prominent environmental writers, supported himself as a land surveyor for much of his life, parceling land that would be sold off to loggers. In the only study of its kind, Patrick Chura analyzes this seeming contradiction to show how the best surveyor in Concord combined civil engineering with civil disobedience. Placing Thoreau's surveying in historical context, Thoreau the Land Surveyor explains the cultural and ideological implications of surveying work in the mid-nineteenth century. Chura explains the ways that Thoreau's environmentalist disposition and philosophical convictions asserted themselves even as he reduced the land to measurable terms and acted as an agent for bringing it under proprietary control. He also describes in detail Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden Pond. By identifying the origins of Walden in--of all places--surveying data, Chura re-creates a previously lost supporting manuscript of this American classic.
Download or read book Walden written by Henry David Thoreau and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: This is Thoreau's classic protest against government's interference with individual liberty. One of the most famous essays ever written, it came to the attention of Gandhi and formed the basis for his passive resistance movement.
Download or read book Thoreaus Sense of Place written by Richard J. Schneider and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2000-05 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent Thoreau studies have shifted to an emphasis on the green" Thoreau, on Thoreau the environmentalist, rooted firmly in particular places and interacting with particular objects. In the wake of Buell's Environmental Imagination, the nineteen essayists in this challenging volume address the central questions in Thoreau studies today: how “green,” how immersed in a sense of place, was Thoreau really, and how has this sense of place affected the tradition of nature writing in America? The contributors to this stimulating collection address the ways in which Thoreau and his successors attempt to cope with the basic epistemological split between perceiver and place inherent in writing about nature; related discussions involve the kinds of discourse most effective for writing about place. They focus on the impact on Thoreau and his successors of culturally constructed assumptions deriving from science, politics, race, gender, history, and literary conventions. Finally, they explore the implications surrounding a writer's appropriation or even exploitation of places and objects.
Download or read book Essays written by Henry D. Thoreau and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV A treasure trove of Thoreau’s most noteworthy essays, with plentiful annotations by leading Thoreau scholar Jeffrey S. Cramer /div
Download or read book Where I Lived and What I Lived For written by Henry Thoreau and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Thoreau's account of his solitary and self-sufficient home in the New England woods remains an inspiration to the environmental movement - a call to his fellow men to abandon their striving, materialistic existences of 'quiet desperation' for a simple life within their means, finding spiritual truth through awareness of the sheer beauty of their surroundings.
Download or read book Walden and Other Writings written by Henry David Thoreau and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2000-11-01 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry David Thoreau's vision of personal freedom is indelibly etched on the American consciousness. 'We need the tonic of wildness,' Thoreau wrote in Walden, and by turning his back on town amenities to build a house on Walden Pond in 1845, he helped shape our notions of the individual, subsistence, and a moral relation to nature. Raising white beans and potatoes that he sold to his Concord neighbors, he stayed for two years; his book records both the philosophy he developed while living alone and the facts of his everyday life. Included here with the complete text of Walden are selections from Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; 'A Plea for Captain John Brown,' his eloquent defense of the American abolitionist's rebellion at Harper's Ferry, and such masterpieces as his famous essay 'Civil Disobedience,' in which he describes a night spent in prison for refusing to pay a poll tax to a government that condoned slavery.
Download or read book Henry David Thoreau written by Laura Dassow Walls and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-07-07 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[The author] traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and 'America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.' By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated? Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, [the author] presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his 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."--
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 The Maine Woods written by Henry David Thoreau and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a period of three years, Henry David Thoreau made three trips to the largely unexplored woods of Maine. He scaled peaks, paddled a canoe, and dined on hemlock tea and moose lips. Taking notes, he acutely observed the rich flora and fauna, as well as the few people he met dotting the landscape, like lumberers, boat-men, and the Abnaki Indians. The Maine Woods is an American classic, a voyage into nature and the heart of early America.
Download or read book Thoreau the Land Surveyor written by Patrick Chura and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2010-10-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry David Thoreau, one of America’s most prominent environmental writers, supported himself as a land surveyor for much of his life, parceling land that would be sold off to loggers. In the only study of its kind, Patrick Chura analyzes this seeming contradiction to show how the best surveyor in Concord combined civil engineering with civil disobedience. Placing Thoreau's surveying in historical context, Thoreau the Land Surveyor explains the cultural and ideological implications of surveying work in the mid-nineteenth century. Chura explains the ways that Thoreau's environmentalist disposition and philosophical convictions asserted themselves even as he reduced the land to measurable terms and acted as an agent for bringing it under proprietary control. He also describes in detail Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden Pond. By identifying the origins of Walden in--of all places--surveying data, Chura re-creates a previously lost supporting manuscript of this American classic.
Download or read book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers written by Henry David Thoreau and published by . This book was released on 1873 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Essays of Henry David Thoreau written by Henry David Thoreau and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1992-03 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.
Download or read book Thoreau Country written by Herbert Wendell Gleason and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
