NORTHEAST.
History.
In the 1970s, Robert A. Gross wrote about the Minutemen of the town of Concord, Massachusetts, and won America’s most prestigious award at the time: the Bancroft Prize. In the Transcendentalists and Their World, Gross, a seasoned periodical writer as well as author of full-length history (oh, and also a professor emeritus if you still felt him “credential light”) returned to Concord and set out on an even more ambitious documentary, at least by way of book length. The inner dust-jacket description poses this curious question: “How did a small and seemingly quiet village in the hinterlands of Boston become, by popular reckoning, the birthplace of two revolutions?” Gross dedicates himself to the answer … Concord, like so many small American towns in the early-mid 1800s, was being pulled into the wider world by way of rapid commercial and social expansion. If still mainly pre-industrial and agrarian, America was nonetheless marching relentlessly forward. This brought the small, entrenched, and sedentary traits of once far removed communities into conflict with motion, technology, and the restless sprint of both entrepreneurial and ideological spirits. Naturally, this worked to cleave past and future, pitting skeptical traditionalists against those ready to agitate on behalf of ways new and emerging. But as with all transformative periods, this one also spun off splinter groups viewing both the past and emerging future with skepticism—and this, if only because there seemed a greater loss of ideals involved, ideals that they took from either camp. Transcendentalism was a revolt of writers and thinkers alike during the decades prior to the Civil War who could see both the dead letters of the past in the present and the grotesque deformities of the present still animating proposed futures. A return to a wonder for nature, taking a stand against the enslavement of others, universal suffrage, revolting against money-making for its own sake, and saving the very soul of a nation supposedly driving towards greater freedom, greater autonomy. All of this flowed from Concord’s transcendentalist core as a millrace, run through the movement’s champions: Emerson, Thoreau, the Allcotts, and others, and is to be found with unsparing detail between this book’s boards. [Condition: Aside from slight rumpling on the dust-jacket and a scuff or two, this book at first glance looked almost new. Yet on opening it up we discovered extensive pencil markings on the inside pages. We have attempted to mitigate their disruptive presence, but trace amounts persist. We downgraded its condition accordingly to "Used Good," despite its very good outward appearance.]
Condition: Used Good.
Nonfiction / History.
Robert A. Gross.
Farrah, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Hardcover (First Edition), 836 pgs, 6 x 9.25" / 2 lbs 9 oz
