Robert Gross - "The Transcendentalists and Their World" - Eric Slauter

Bancroft- Prize winning historian Robert Gross will discuss The Transcendentalists and Their World, a 2021 Co-op Notable, and recently named one of the ten best books of the year by the Wall Street Journal. He will be joined in conversation with Eric Slauter, Director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.

Presented in partnership with the University of Chicago’s Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.

REGISTER HERE.

About the book: 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.

About the author: Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Minutemen and Their World (1976), winner of the Bancroft Prize, and of Books and Libraries in Thoreau’s Concord (1988); with Mary Kelley, he is coeditor of An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (2010). A former assistant editor of Newsweek, he has written for such periodicals as Esquire, Harper’s, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times, and his essays have appeared in The American Scholar, New England Quarterly, Raritan, and Yale Review. 

About the interlocutor: Eric Slauter is the Director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture and the author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution.  

General discount: The Scherer Center is pleased to offer a 15% discount and free shipping for all purchases of The Transcendentalists and Their World made through the Seminary Coop before January 20. Please use coupon code SCHERER. You will not ultimately be charged for shipping, though your credit card will be pre-authorized to cover it. We apologize for the inconvenience.  

Conversations in American Culture: This event is the first in the Scherer Center's new series of Conversations in American Culture presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op. The next guest will be David Henkin, Margaret Byrne Professor of History at Berkeley, on Thursday, January 27, at 6pm CST, via zoom, to discuss his new book, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are (Yale). A registration link and further details will be available in the following weeks.