In November 1839, a group of women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women. The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts o...

It is increasingly commonplace to find scholars who circle back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and his intellectual heirs as a way of better understanding contemporary social and aesthetic contexts. Why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? In this innovative study, Randall Fuller examines the way pivotal twentieth-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. He examines previously unp...

**A compelling portrait of a unique moment in American history when the ideas of Charles Darwin reshaped American notions about nature, religion, science and race“A lively and informative history.” – The New York Times Book Review**Throughout its history America has been torn in two by debates over ideals and beliefs. Randall Fuller takes us back to one of those turning points, in 1860, with the story of the influence of Charles Darwin’s just-published On the O...

When Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, Walt Whitman declared it "the volcanic upheaval of the nation"--the bloody inception of a war that would dramatically alter the shape and character of American culture along with its political, racial, and social landscape. Prior to the war, America's leading writers had been integral to helping the young nation imagine itself, assert its beliefs, and realize its immense potential. When the Civil War erupted, it forced them to ...

A group biography of five women who played path-breaking roles in the transcendentalist movement In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society “to answer the great questions” of special importance to women: "What are we born to do? How shall we do it?" The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking...

When Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, Walt Whitman declared it "the volcanic upheaval of the nation"--the bloody inception of a war that would dramatically alter the shape and character of American culture along with its political, racial, and social landscape. Prior to the war, America's leading writers had been integral to helping the young nation imagine itself, assert its beliefs, and realize its immense potential. When the Civil War erupted, it forced them to ...

Civil Disobedience is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. It argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Washington Irving-author, ambassador, and Manhattanite-has largely slipped from America's memory, and yet, his creations are well known. Acclaimed historian Andrew Burstein returns Irving to the context of his native nineteenth century where he was an international celebrity-both a comic genius and the first American to earn his living as an author. Irving traveled through Europe and America, excavating tales and writing popular social satire, beloved children's stories, gothic drama, and ...

If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates thatMelville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy stor...

Washington, Adams, Henry, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton: their ambitions, intrigues, and jealousies shaped the birth of the nation, but they overcame their foibles and imperfections to throw off the chains of tyranny and form a more perfect union. We think of them now as faces on money or statues on pedestals, and, as Burns illustrates in luminous prose, that’s exactly what they always wanted to be. They all possessed astonishing brilliance, but many had large egos and more than just a...

Mark Twain's final and uncensored masterpiece, presented in three volumes, is a landmark publication in American literature.**“Twain will begin to seem strange again, alluring and still astonishing . . . in ways that still resonate with us.”—New York Times“His crystalline humor and expansive range are a continuous source of delight and awe.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review**"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a fri...

Extracts From Adam's Diary " NOTE.--I translated a portion of this diary some years ago, and a friend of mine printed a few copies in an incomplete form, but the public never got them. Since then I have deciphered some more of Adam's hieroglyphics, and think he has now become sufficiently important as a public character to justify this publication.--M. T." Eve's Diary is a comic short story by Mark Twain. It was first published in the 1905 Christmas issue of the magazine Harper's Bazaar, a...