Blog & News

Kick off this year's Annual Gathering with an early morning walk around Punkatasset Hill with Peter Alden, Thursday, July 11, 2019. Meet at 6:30am on Keyes Rd to carpool.

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Engineering Thoreau: The Theme for Our 2019 Annual Gathering

Engineering Thoreau: Nature, Technology, and the Connected Life

Today, people don't ordinarily associate Thoreau with engineering, but many of his contemporaries made this connection. In his eulogy of Thoreau, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson said that he felt the loss of his friend's "rare powers of action" so keenly that he could not "help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this,...

Walt Whitman at 200: The Concord Connection

On the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth, join in a celebration of his work at a Whitman Poetry Reading, with commentary by Concord historian Richard Smith. Smith will illustrate the ways in which Concord residents and Transcendentalists, such as Thoreau and Emerson, supported and influenced Whitman.

Friday, May 31, 2019 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm

First Parish in Concord, 20 Lexington Rd., Concord, MA.

Learn more about Thoreau and Whitman's mutual admiration, Henry Stephens Salt, ...

New England Singers: Merrimack, with Text by Thoreau

The New England Classical Singers will perform

Merrimack, with text by Henry David Thoreau

NECS celebrates its 50th Anniversary with the premier of a specially commissioned work by local composer Ronald Perera, Merrimack, with text by Henry Thoreau. Also experience the expressive vocal and instrumental soundscapes in Perera’s Why I Wake Early, based on the works of recently deceased local poet Mary Oliver. Both pieces performed with chorus accompanied by string quartet and piano...

Laura Dassow Walls lecture at Boston University

On February 27, 2019, Laura Dassow Walls, the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, will deliver the 6th annual Silas Peirce lecture, "Henry David Thoreau’s Legacy of Resistance and Hope," at Boston University. To register and get directions, visit Boston University's announcement page. (Registration is appreciated but not required.)

It might seem that Henry David Thoreau, who celebrated his 200th birthday in 2017, could have little to say to us today—yet nothing could...

Thoreau Society Graduate Student Fellowship

2019 Thoreau Society Graduate Student Fellowship

The Thoreau Society is pleased to announce its inaugural graduate student fellowship. The 2019 Thoreau Graduate Student Fellow will receive $1,000 for travel and Thoreau-related research in greater Boston area, plus free attendance at the 2019 Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord, Massachusetts. (Attendance at the Annual Gathering is not required and will not be factored into the fellowship committee’s evaluation.)

We welcome applications from scholars whose work will contribute to Thoreau scholarship or whose work...

Slavery’s Determined Foe: The Legacy of John Brown

Posted on Wicked Local: Concord

The Concord Museum will host “Slavery’s Determined Foe: The Legacy of John Brown” with two scholars, Dr. Amanda Gilvin and Laura McDonald, at 7 p.m. Jan. 24 at the Rasmussen Education Center., 200 Lexington Road, Concord.

Concord is home to the flashpoint of a revolution, discussions of protest, peace and war and the people who defined American ideals. Inspired by this past, the Concord Perspectives series uses history as a lens to analyze...

Henry David Thoreau: Surveyor of the Soul