Robert A. Gross

Culture and Cultivation: Agriculture and Society in Thoreau's Concord

The town of Concord, Massachusetts, is usually thought of as the home of minutemen and transcendentalists-the place where the embattled farmers launched Americas war for political independence on April 19, 1775, and where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, more than a half-century later, waged their own struggles for intellectual independence, both for themselves as writers and for American culture as a whole. But in the late nineteenth century, Concord acquired a distinction it never possessed in the years when it was seedbed of revolutionary scholars and soldiers. It became a leading center of agricultural improvement. Thanks to the coming of the railroad in 1844, Concord farmers played milkmen to the metropolis and branched out into market gardening and fruit raising as well. Concord was nursery to a popular new variety of grape, developed by a retired mechanic-turned-horticulturist named Ephraim Bull. And to crown its reputation, the town called the cultural capital of antebellum America by Stanley Elkins became the asparagus capital of the Gilded Age. Concord was, in short, a full participant in yet another revolution: the agricultural revolution that transformed the countryside of New England in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. 1 The progress of that agricultural revolution forms my central theme. The minutemen of 1775 inhabited a radically different world from that of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren on the eve of the Civil War. We know the general outlines of how things changed-that farmers gradually abandoned producing their own food, clothing, and tools and turned to supplying specialized, urban markets for a living. In the process, they rationalized their methods and altered the ways they thought about their work. Theirs was a

The Transnational Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World

Few American writers have been so rooted in a single place as Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, sixteen miles west of Boston, Thoreau spent nearly all his short life, some forty-four years, in the vicinity of his native town – “the most estimable place in all the world” he deemed it – with only brief sojourns beyond New England. Like many of his contemporaries, he did try out the big city, living close to Manhattan in 1843, an aspiring writer, age twenty-six, with hopes of a literary career. But he quickly recoiled from the urban scene. “I dont like the city better, the more I see it, but worse,” he wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. … The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.” Homesick, he was back in Concord within six months. Only once did he stray outside the United States, for a week-long excursion to Montreal and Quebec. To this “Yankee in Canada,” it was a disappointing jaunt. “What I got by going to Canada was a cold.” Thoreau was simply happiest in his hometown, where he “traveled a good deal,” exploring the ponds, woods, and fields, observing and provoking the neighbors, and transforming his chosen ground, in Walden and in his journals, into a sacred site on the American literary landscape. Concord, he declared, is “my Rome, and its people … my Romans.”

The Impudent Historian: Challenging Deference in Early America

If only the anonymous Swiss immigrant who came to Pennsylvania in 1750 had met William Moraley. Without the means to pay his passage to the New World, the hapless newcomer whose bitter encounter with America is cited by Aaron S. Fogleman was obliged to indenture himself for three years to a man he deemed the worst master in all of Pennsylvania. It was a miserable fate, but the Swiss native resigned himself to necessity, enduring oppression for fourteen months until a couple of friends from the old country released him from bondage. Had Moraley been around to advise him, the poor servant could have avoided the wait. Following that Englishmans example, as recounted by Michael Zuckerman, he would have demanded better treatment from his master, and that failing, run away. In a New World where labor was scarce and land abundant, Moraley quickly discovered the essential freedom that America afforded all audacious underlings and took to the road, confident in his ability to survive on his impudent wits. Alas, the Swiss immigrant never acquired that lesson. America, he concluded, was a country of constraints. To potential settlers from Switzerland, his advice was blunt: Stay away. How do we account for the contrasting experiences of these two immigrants to the middle colonies, the implications of which take us down very different roads in interpreting early America? Not by length of residence in the New World: while the Swiss servant submitted without protest, Moraley was scheming to break his indenture almost as soon as he had landed in Philadelphia, one of the most delightful Cities upon Earth. Nor by the modest goals the two men pursued: in the abundance of Americathe best poor Mans Country in the World, Moraley deemed it -both hoped to escape Europes poverty and oppression and to better their Condition of Life. Despite these affinities, the sad sack from Switzerland seems never to have imbibed the free air of the New World that aroused Moraleys

A Yankee Rebellion? The Regulators, New England, and the New Nation

Was Shayss Rebellion a sign of a general crisis of self-government in the new nation, or was it a peculiarly Yankee affair This essay suggests that wrenching changes, growing out of the Revolution in Massachusetts, turned a conflict over taxes common to all the states into a unique and short-lived political upheaval.

The Machine-Readable Transcendentalists: Cultural History on the Computer

THIS ESSAY reports on an effort to integrate statistics and the computer into the humanities classroom. In History 55, “Culture and Community: The Worlds of Emerson, Dickinson, and Thoreau,” at Amherst College, students were asked to carry out quantitative analyses of the U.S. census of 1850 for the towns of Amherst and Concord, Massachusetts. This assignment was conceived as a project in social history, through which students would reconstruct the contours of community life. But the investigation of the census transformed the main lines of the course, even the ways in which students interpreted the writings of the Transcendentalists. For the census represented not only a register of society, but also a cultural text produced in that society and manifesting a distinctive world view, that of the emerging social scientists of Victorian America. To study the census was thus to uncover the origins of the very frame of mind, against which writers like Emerson and Thoreau reacted. And so, a course that began in the attempt to bridge the humanities and social sciences eventually became self-reflexive: the origins of the “two cultures” lay in the very time and place we were studying. Recovering that history proved liberating. In the course of quantifying society, students transcended the intellectual divide between the humanities and sciences and achieved a deeper historical consciousness.