“Why Concord?” asks historian Robert A. Gross in the preface to his new book, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). One drizzly October afternoon I asked him the same question about his own choice to devote much of his career to examining this singular dot on the map of New England.
“I came to study Concord not because I was interested in the local history,” he said. “I was interested in the local history as it helped to tell a national history. And I’ve come to love living here. I love the fact that I’m telling a large story with broad implications in one place, a place that is not a backwater, not on the margins.”
Join renowned author and historian Robert A. Gross for an engaging presentation, “The Minutemen and Their World Revisited.” Nearly 50 years after the publication of his groundbreaking work, Prof.Gross revisits his original interpretation. Does it still hold true? What new discoveries and perspectives have emerged in the past half-century to reshape our understanding?
