Henry David Thoreau’s encounter with Cape Cod begins with a scene of chaos. He writes, “…we found that the Provincetown steamer, which should have got in the day before, had not yet arrived, on account of a violent storm; and, as we noticed in the streets a handbill headed, ‘Death! 145 lives lost at Cohasset!’ we decided to go by way of Cohasset.”1 Coming upon the wreck of the brig St. John, Thoreau is confronted with a vast morgue, and is stunned by the chaotic destruction rendered to the ship by the sea. “The largest timbers and iron braces were broken superfluously,...
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This past July, Iranian scholar Alireza "Ali" Taghdarreh left his country for the first time to visit America. Taghdarreh has produced the first-ever Persian translation of Walden. We were honored to have him come to Concord to speak at our 2015 Annual Gathering "Thoreau's Sense of Place."
The Walden Woods Project invited Taghdarreh to speak at the Institute to celebrate their 25th anniversary. He was introduced by their chairman, Don Henley, of the Eagles. You may...
The town of Concord, Massachusetts, is widely known as the home of Minutemen and Transcendentalists. It is the place where “embattled farmers” fired “the shot heard ‘round the world” on the 19th of April 1775, and launched the war for political independence. It is equally famous as the residence of the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who more than a half-century later, waged a second American revolution for intellectual and spiritual independence. But had you come to this small town of some two thousand souls, sixteen miles west of Boston, in the mid-1820s to mark...
At a time when educational reform programs have teachers concerned about their autonomy in the classroom, Henry David Thoreau’s early teaching career may offer some inspiration. It began in 1835, when Thoreau took time off from college to teach in Canton, Massachusetts. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he briefly accepted a position at the Concord Center School, but resigned a few weeks later when he disagreed with the school policy mandating corporal punishment.
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On December 27, 1854, Henry Thoreau traveled to Nantucket Island to give a lecture titled “What Shall it Profit?” According to the advertisement in the December 8, 1854, edition of The Inquirer, one of the two island newspapers at the time, he was to speak as part of a “course of Lectures before the Proprietors of the Nantucket Atheneum.” The advertisement went on to say, “The Committee have limited the number of tickets, that the Hall may not be crowded.” A good turnout was...
Fourteen years before Henry David Thoreau climbed Mount Katahdin, and twenty-five years before his travels on the Allegash and Penobscot Rivers, John James Audubon and his family, who were traveling in search of northern birds and subscribers to The Birds of America (1827-1838), spent several weeks in rural Maine. As we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Maine Woods, we may want to consider the art and writings that Audubon produced...
In a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, "10 Things You Might Not Know about Fear," Mark Jacob and Stephan Benzkofer mentioned the relatively obscure origins of FDR's famous declaration in the face of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!" As Jacob and Benzkofer report, Eleanor Roosevelt was once asked about the origins of this frequently quoted sentence in her husband's first...
Scot Miller's photography has been featured in many books and publications. He is the author of Walden: 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of the American Classic, Cape Cod: Illustrated Edition of the American Classic, and, most recently, Thoreau’s Maine Woods: A Photographic Journey Through an American Wilderness. Scot’s lifelong commitment to conservation is reflected in his photographic illustrations of Thoreau’s writings, his work for The Yosemite Fund, and his support for the Walden Woods Project, to which he offers his...
On September 30, 2014, the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) held a community meeting to gather additional input from stakeholders, including the Thoreau Society, on the design of the new Visitor Center at Walden Pond. Construction of the new building, which will include exhibit space and a bookstore, will begin in the spring of 2015 and finish in 2016. Through the Friends of Walden Pond, our long-term partnership with the DCR...
Henry David Thoreau’s “Chesuncook,” the second essay of The Maine Woods, is well known for the controversy resulting from Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell’s decision to remove a now famous sentence referring to a pine tree.1 One hundred and fifty years later, Thoreau’s essay continues to resonate for another reason: its extended meditation on hunting, a pastime that attracts Americans to the woods throughout the...