Articles by Richard Smith

When November rolls around each year many Americans begin to think about the upcoming holidays. Traditional family recipes are dusted off for Thanksgiving as relatives and friends are invited to share the feast. Almost as soon as dinner is over, thoughts turn to Christmas as decorations, presents, and parties become the center of attention. Many of our holiday traditions date back to the 19th century, and modern Americans would easily recognize their ancestor’s Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. 

“October is the month for painted leaves,” Henry Thoreau wrote in 1860. “Their rich glow now flashes round the world.” And while it’s true that other parts of the world experience autumnal tints every year, they seem to be brighter and more vivid in New England. 

In 1860, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family returned to Concord after living abroad for seven years. Now, back in the home they called The Wayside, the Hawthornes would rejoin their circle of literary friends.

As tensions between the North and South increased throughout the 1850s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, like many Americans, was becoming more resigned to the prospect of civil war. He was convinced that the “insanity” of the South’s attachment to slavery would soon tear the nation apart.

The Sons of Liberty was not just a Boston organization. The colonies of New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia all had Patriot groups calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. In the years leading up to the American Revolution all the groups were in contact with each other, and all were united to rally public support for colonial resistance against the Crown. 

With the death of King George II on October 25, 1760, his 22-year-old grandson George III became the King of Great Britain and Ireland. Reports of the ascension of the new monarch reached the American colonies in early January 1761, and the first colonists to hear the news were the people of Massachusetts. The rise of the man who would become the last king of America was met with great fanfare and joy. 

Of all the writers and philosophers who influenced the New England Transcendentalists, none had a bigger impact than Thomas Carlyle. Born in Scotland in 1795, as an essayist, historian, and philosopher, Carlyle had a profound influence on the 19th century, not just in the United Kingdom, but also in America, particularly with the writers in Concord, Massachusetts. 

Virtually every member of the Transcendentalist circle read Carlyle’s writings with great enthusiasm; Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, William Henry Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, and Henry Thoreau all drew inspiration from Carlyle. In particular, it was his writings on Germanic literature that lit a flame under the Transcendentalists. 

By 1845, the careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were on very different tracks. Hawthorne was a struggling writer living in Concord, Massachusetts, while Poe was in New York City, a celebrated writer and literary critic known around the country. Yet, in the 1840s, the two men’s careers became briefly entwined. 

With the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Great Britain was now in control of North America: the 13 British colonies along the seaboard were safe and sound from their enemies, while all French territory east of the Mississippi, as well as Spanish Florida, now belonged to King George III. For the first time since 1701, Great Britain was at peace. But the empire was also broke. 

This spring marks the 180th anniversary of Samuel Melvin’s birth on April 9, 1844. While the entire family would be deeply and tragically affected by the Civil War, Samuel, the fourth child and third son, went through a particularly hard time while serving in the Union Army. This is the story of his Civil War.