blog

From the Morgan Library & Museum:

Thoreau’s Journal: A Life of Listening

Listen to Thoreau’s personal reflections on nature, friendship, slavery, and society. 

For a quarter century, American author Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) filled notebook after notebook with his observations and reflections, strong in the belief that a closely examined life would yield infinite...

Join us for the Thoreau Bicentennial Annual Gathering!  We have an exciting lineup of activities planned this year, including walks, conversations, music, dramatic performances and more.  All are welcome to help celebrate Henry David Thoreau's 200th Birthday! For more information, visit Thoreau Bicentennial.org

Among the many occupations that Henry Thoreau plied throughout his life—school teacher, essayist, lecturer, pencil maker, and occasional helping hand in a myriad of day jobs in Concord—his career as a land surveyor, perhaps, is one of the most curious. As Patrick Chura has pointedly observed, in colonial North America, “the multiple purposes of establishing individual ownership, taxable value and legal jurisdiction were embodied in the person of the land surveyor.”1  While Thoreau “enjoyed surveying, for no other job gave him the same freedom to set his own hours and places of business,”...

The past few years have been marked by a series of extrajudicial murders of Black people by police and vigilantes and by the emergence of a nationwide protest movement loosely united under the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” The Black community and their activist allies have expressed outrage in the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and many others, and have organized rallies, vigils, and direct actions in cities across the United States. Black Lives Matter has sought to...