Henry David Thoreau

Why do the Transcendentalists still have an outsize influence on American culture?

Decades before Thoreau's famous experiment, a community of formerly enslaved men and women had a much different experience of life in the woods.

A friend of Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sewall Osgood's pursuit of her scientific passion illuminates the limits and possibilities placed on the era's women.

How Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, caught on in tight-knit Concord, Massachusetts.

It’s time to fight for the original and heretofore unachieved goals of the women’s movement.

How a Los Angeles Times editor helped create the myth of the American West.

A new book argues that Darwin failed to capture the American imagination because of the untimely death of Henry David Thoreau.

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit.

The long history and contemporary relevance of war tax resistance.

Ever since Thoreau headed to Walden, our attention has been wandering.

The story of Swami Vivekananda and his time in America.

A new book explores the final days of Ralph Waldo Emerson - traveling from Concord to California, and beyond.

Wetlands absorb carbon dioxide and buffer the excesses of drought and flood, yet we’ve drained much of this land. Can we learn to love our swamps?

John Brown and the historical novel.

Why have historians overlooked the connections between abolitionism and the famous New England cultural movement?

The plant explorers of the USDA succeeded in bringing the world’s fruits to American supermarkets. But at what human, ecological, and gustatory cost?

For more than a century, U.S. wars of invasion have claimed a humanitarian mantle.

Traditional environmentalism has lacked a meaningful, practical democratic vision, rendering it largely marginal to the day-to-day lives of most Americans.

Notes toward a history of isolation.