Black Walden

Black Walden PDF Author: Elise Lemire
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Concord, Massachusetts, has long been heralded as the birthplace of American liberty and American letters. It was here that the first military engagement of the Revolutionary War was fought and here that Thoreau came to "live deliberately" on the shores of Walden Pond. Between the Revolution and the settlement of the little cabin with the bean rows, however, Walden Woods was home to several generations of freed slaves and their children. Living on the fringes of society, they attempted to pursue lives of freedom, promised by the rhetoric of the Revolution, and yet withheld by the practice of racism. Thoreau was all but alone in his attempt "to conjure up the former occupants of these woods." Other than the chapter he devoted to them in Walden, the history of slavery in Concord has been all but forgotten. In Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts, Elise Lemire brings to life the former slaves of Walden Woods and the men and women who held them in bondage during the eighteenth century. After charting the rise of Concord slaveholder John Cuming, Black Walden follows the struggles of Cuming's slave, Brister, as he attempts to build a life for himself after thirty-five years of enslavement. Brister Freeman, as he came to call himself, and other of the town's slaves were able to leverage the political tensions that fueled the American Revolution and force their owners into relinquishing them. Once emancipated, however, the former slaves were permitted to squat on only the most remote and infertile places. Walden Woods was one of them. Here, Freeman and his neighbors farmed, spun linen, made baskets, told fortunes, and otherwise tried to survive in spite of poverty and harassment. With a new preface that reflects on community developments since the hardcover's publication, Black Walden reminds us that this was a black space before it was an internationally known green space and preserves the legacy of the people who strove against all odds to overcome slavery and segregation.

Black Walden

Black Walden PDF Author: Elise Lemire
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Concord, Massachusetts, has long been heralded as the birthplace of American liberty and American letters. It was here that the first military engagement of the Revolutionary War was fought and here that Thoreau came to "live deliberately" on the shores of Walden Pond. Between the Revolution and the settlement of the little cabin with the bean rows, however, Walden Woods was home to several generations of freed slaves and their children. Living on the fringes of society, they attempted to pursue lives of freedom, promised by the rhetoric of the Revolution, and yet withheld by the practice of racism. Thoreau was all but alone in his attempt "to conjure up the former occupants of these woods." Other than the chapter he devoted to them in Walden, the history of slavery in Concord has been all but forgotten. In Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts, Elise Lemire brings to life the former slaves of Walden Woods and the men and women who held them in bondage during the eighteenth century. After charting the rise of Concord slaveholder John Cuming, Black Walden follows the struggles of Cuming's slave, Brister, as he attempts to build a life for himself after thirty-five years of enslavement. Brister Freeman, as he came to call himself, and other of the town's slaves were able to leverage the political tensions that fueled the American Revolution and force their owners into relinquishing them. Once emancipated, however, the former slaves were permitted to squat on only the most remote and infertile places. Walden Woods was one of them. Here, Freeman and his neighbors farmed, spun linen, made baskets, told fortunes, and otherwise tried to survive in spite of poverty and harassment. With a new preface that reflects on community developments since the hardcover's publication, Black Walden reminds us that this was a black space before it was an internationally known green space and preserves the legacy of the people who strove against all odds to overcome slavery and segregation.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand PDF Author: Helen Simonson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 140880932X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Major Ernest Pettigrew is perfectly content to lead a quiet life in the sleepy village of Edgecombe St Mary, away from the meddling of the locals and his overbearing son. But when his brother dies, the Major finds himself seeking companionship with the village shopkeeper, Mrs Ali. Drawn together by a love of books and the loss of their partners, they are soon forced to contend with irate relatives and gossiping villagers. The perfect gentleman, but the most unlikely hero, the Major must ask himself what matters most: family obligation, tradition or love? Funny, comforting and heart-warming, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand proves that sometimes, against all odds, life does give you a second chance.

Concord, Massachusetts Births, Marriages, And Deaths, 1635-1850

Concord, Massachusetts Births, Marriages, And Deaths, 1635-1850 PDF Author: Concord (Mass )
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781016059831
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The History of Concord, Massachusetts

The History of Concord, Massachusetts PDF Author: Alfred Sereno Hudson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Concord (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description


The Transcendentalists and Their World

The Transcendentalists and Their World PDF Author: Robert A. Gross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374711887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
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.

A History Of The Town Of Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts: From Its Earliest Settlement To 1832: And Of The Adjoining Towns, Bedford, Acton, L

A History Of The Town Of Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts: From Its Earliest Settlement To 1832: And Of The Adjoining Towns, Bedford, Acton, L PDF Author: Lemuel Shattuck
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781016901772
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Hawthorne in Concord

Hawthorne in Concord PDF Author: Philip McFarland
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 1555846882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A richly textured account of the writer’s three sojourns in New England “illuminates Hawthorne’s art and the intellectual ferment originating in that small, bucolic town” (Publishers Weekly). On his wedding day in 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne escorted his new wife, Sophia, to their first home, the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. There, enriched by friendships with Thoreau and Emerson, he enjoyed an idyllic time. But three years later, unable to make enough money from his writing, he returned ingloriously, with his wife and infant daughter, to live in his mother’s home in Salem. In 1853, Hawthorne moved back to Concord, now the renowned author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Eager to resume writing fiction at the scene of his earlier happiness, he assembled a biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce, who was running for president. When Pierce won the election, Hawthorne was appointed the lucrative post of consul in Liverpool. Coming home from Europe in 1860, Hawthorne settled down in Concord once more. He tried to take up writing one last time, but deteriorating health found him withdrawing into private life. In Hawthorne in Concord, acclaimed historian Philip McFarland paints a revealing portrait of this well-loved American author during three distinct periods of his life, spent in the bucolic village of Concord, Massachusetts. “I don’t know when I have read a book as satisfying as Hawthorne in Concord.” —David Herbert Donald

Concord and the Dawn of Revolution

Concord and the Dawn of Revolution PDF Author: D. Michael Ryan
Publisher: American Chronicles
ISBN: 9781596291867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Any red-blooded American knows that the first action of the Revolutionary War took place at Concord, Massachusetts, with the shot heard 'round the world. But a good deal of what is widely known about those early days of the Revolution is wrong. In this new book, historian D. Michael Ryan illuminates acts of uprising of Patriots and Loyalists during the first action of the Revolutionary War in and around Concord. Through a series of compelling essays, Ryan debunks historical myths and salutes those who fought for the recognition of our nation and became the first heroes of the fledgling United States. What was romanticized and changed in the generations since the Revolution is presented here directly through the voices of the people who faced the shocking facts of war and rebellion. From Dr. Samuel Prescott, who joined Paul Revere on his famous ride and left fiancée Lydia Mulliken behind, to the mystery of the Bedford Flag unfurled on April 19, these stories reveal the truths of our founding fathers and mothers. As their lives were interrupted by the birth of a country, the citizens of Concord saw their friends and neighbors engaged in acts of bravery and of depravity. Ryan's account of the shot heard 'round the world, provides a glimpse at the realities of the American Revolution.

The Minutemen and Their World

The Minutemen and Their World PDF Author: Robert A. Gross
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374706395
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The Bancroft Prize–winning classic of American history now in a revised and expanded edition with a new preface and 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 height 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 A. 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.

Mosses from an Old Manse

Mosses from an Old Manse PDF Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : New England
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Presents twenty-six moral tales written during Hawthorne's residence in the historic Concord house.