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Henry David Thoreau - Abolitionist and Environmentalist
Beloved American poet, naturalist, and transcendentalist, Thoreau was an outspoken abolitionist, advocate for civil disobedience and father of the modern environmentalist movement.
Thoreau lived in a household of strong women: His sisters set the pace in antislavery activism, and Thoreau willingly took his cues from them. He even admired and sympathized with the laborers building the railroads that would clatter along the edge of his beloved Walden pond.
Thoreau was an abolitionist who brought Frederick Douglass to speak at the Concord Lyceum—a kind of community university—and participated in the Underground Railroad, to the point of risking charges of treason by helping enslaved people flee to Canada.
He moved to Walden on the Fourth of July—that was a step toward a deliberate and reflective re-rooting to experiment in material simplicity.
His two-year experiment of living by himself n the woods outside of Concord Mass. was also an exercise in shaping a style and a self. He used his observations of nature to discover essential truths about life and the universe. He published Walden in 1854
Thoreau studied the landscape and wild things, studied his townsmen from a middle distance, and, through it all, studied himself. He concluded that none of these things could be seen whole if they were viewed in isolation from the rest
Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau questioned the doctrines of established churches and capitalistic habits of the merchant class.
They argued for a mystical and intuitive way of thinking as a means of discovering one’s inner self looking for the essence of God in nature. They could “transcend” experience and reason though their intuitive powers to discover universal truth.
The Transcendentalists saw beauty in nature, but ugliness in a materialistic society full of greed and avarice (excessive or insatiable desire for wealth or gain)
This Group of free thinkers from New England believed that man is not only good, but divine. The old Puritan notion about man’s sinfulness was replaced by a belief in his divinity.
They saw beauty in nature, but ugliness in a society full of greed and avarice. At first they meet at George Ripley’s home in Boston to discuss their beliefs and ideas, then a few of them founded Brook Farm where they could live together and put their ideas into practice.
The Transcendentalists saw beauty in nature, but ugliness in a materialistic society full of greed and avarice (excessive or insatiable desire for wealth or gain)
Most obviously, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the Hudson River School helped shape an emerging national identity. Viewed collectively, their work articulated America’s “coming of age,” a nation in the process of discovering itself as distinct from Europe. The writings of Emerson and Thoreau with the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School offered nuanced interpretations of the unique relations of the American people to the land. Clearly Emerson and the Hudson River painters believed that Nature gave proof of God’s Providence for the new nation—a theme readily understood, given the religious history of the colonists.
We don't own this place, though we act as if we did,
It's a loan from the children of our children's kids. The actual owners haven't even been born yet.
Bur we never tend the garden and rarely we pay the rent, Some of it is broken and the rest of it is bent Put it all on plastic and I wonder where we'll be when the bills hit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
“Spiritual matters over material matters” Stressed the importance of individual inspiration, self-reliance, dissent, and nonconformity
Emerson evoked a nationalistic spirit of Americans by urging them not to imitate European Culture but to create an entirely new and original American culture
In August of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered "The American Scholar" to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College, chastising his audience for their intellectual dependency on British and European writers.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by American writer Herman Melville, published in 1851 during the period of the American Renaissance. Sailor Ishmael tells the story of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale that on the previous whaling voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee. The novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, but during the 20th century, its reputation as a Great American Novel was established.
In the Heart of the Sea - "The Myth of Moby-Dick" Featurette
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