{"product_id":"the-transcendentalists-and-their-world-9780374279325","title":"The Transcendentalists and Their World","description":"\u003cp\u003eOne of The Wall Street Journals 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mails 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize  In the year of the nations 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 thousandplus 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45666214182965,"sku":"ByrdShop_0374279322","price":33.56,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780374279325.jpg?v=1782423566","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-transcendentalists-and-their-world-9780374279325","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}