Robert A. Gross

One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 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.

The Transcendentalists and Their World

Michael Schudson

Janice A. Radway

Stephen Nissenbaum

David D. Hall

Scott E. Casper

Joan Shelley Rubin

Hugh Amory

Mary Kelley

David Paul Nord

Carl F. Kaestle

Jeffrey D. Groves

A History of the Book in America: Industrial book, 1840-1880

"This impressive collaborative effort by two dozen leading authorities in the field will be essential reading for any serious student of the history of American publishing and print culture during one of its most crucially transformative periods." Lawrence Buell, Harvard University "A magnificent achievement. Brilliant editing and graceful writing shatter many old assumptions about the world of the Founders. Linking intellectual history with politics, social change, and the distinctive experiences of women, African Americans and Indians, An Extensive Republic is the rare reference book that is also a mesmerizing read." Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship "This volume provides a fascinating revisionist history of the United States through its focus on what was printed, how the economy of the book trades worked, who was reading, and what role reading came to assume in all sorts of people's lives. Editors Gross and Kelley make a strong team, and the contributors represent an array of disciplines suitable to the equally wide range of printed material in the United States between 1790 and 1840." Patricia Crain, New York University Volume 2 of A History of the Book in America documents the development of a distinctive culture of print in the new American republic. Between 1790 and 1840 printing and publishing expanded, and literate publics provided a ready market for novels, almanacs, newspapers, tracts, and periodicals. Government, business, and reform drove the dissemination of print. Through laws and subsidies, state and federal authorities promoted an informed citizenry. Entrepreneurs responded to rising demand by investing in new technologies and altering the conduct of publishing. Voluntary societies launched libraries, lyceums, and schools, and relied on print to spread religion, redeem morals, and advance benevolent goals. Out of all this ferment emerged new and diverse communities of citizens linked together in a decentralized print culture where citizenship meant literacy and print meant power. Yet in a diverse and far-flung nation, regional differences persisted, and older forms of oral and handwritten communication offered alternatives to print. The early republic was a world of mixed media.

Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840

An Extensive Republic

Winner of the Bancroft Prize The Minutemen and Their World, first published in 1976, is reissued now in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition with a new Foreword by Alan Taylor and a new Afterword by the author. On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The "shot heard round the world" catapulted this sleepy New England town into the midst of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The town--future home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne--soon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.

The Minutemen and Their World

In January 1787 Daniel Shays, a hero of the American Revolution, and an army of farmers, enraged by the program of heavy taxes imposed by the state government in Boston to pay the costs of the Revolutionary War, launched an attack on the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts. The uprising was easily suppressed, but to this day debate still rages over Shay's Rebellion, its relevance to the American Revolution, and its influence on the formation of the United States Constitution.

The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion

In Debt to Shays

Robert A. Gross

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