One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s 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 thousand–plus 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.

Transcendentalism was an important intellectual movement in America, influencing ideas and institutions, swaying politicians, inspiring philanthropists, and creating reformers. Frothingham's history of transcendentalism relates how it shaped the country's national mind and impacted its intellectual and moral character.

The New England Milton concentrates on the poet's place in the writings of the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, and demonstrates that his reception by both groups was a function of their response as members of the New England elite to older and broader sociopolitical tensions in Yankee culture as it underwent the process of modernization. For Milton and his writings (particularly Paradise Lost) were themselves early manifestations of the continuing crisis of authority that later afflicted the dominant class and professions in Boston; and so, the Unitarian Milton, like the Milton of Emerson's lectures or Thoreau's Walden, quite naturally became the vehicle for literary attempts by these authors to resolve the ideological contradictions they had inherited from the Puritan past.

The philosophy explained in terms of selections from the writings of the chief adherents.

Barbara L. Packer's long essay "The Transcendentalists" is widely acknowledged by scholars of nineteenth-century American literary history as the best-written, most comprehensive treatment to date of Transcendentalism. Previously existing only as part of a volume in the magisterial Cambridge History of American Literature, it will now be available for the first time in a stand-alone edition. Packer presents Transcendentalism as a living movement, evolving out of such origins as New England Unitarianism and finding early inspiration in European Romanticism. Transcendentalism changed religious beliefs, philosophical ideas, literary styles, and political allegiances. In addition, it was a social movement whose members collaborated on projects and formed close personal ties. Transcendentalism contains vigorous thought and expression throughout, says Packer; only a study of the entire movement can explain its continuing sway over American thought. Through fresh readings of both the essential Transcendentalist texts and the best current scholarship, Packer conveys the movement's genuine expectations that its radical spirituality not only would lead to personal perfection but also would inspire solutions to such national problems as slavery and disfranchisement. Here is Transcendentalism in whole, with Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller restored to their place alongside such contemporaries as Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Jones Very, Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Orestes Brownson, and Frederick Henry Hedge.

The Dial was a journal published in Boston from July 1840 through April 1844 by the American Transcendentalists and edited by Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Ripley, and Henry David Thoreau. This book is the only full-length study of the Dial available.