The Transcendentalists and Their World

Few books have been as heavily anticipated within the academic community as Robert Gross's The Transcendentalists and Their World. The sequel to The Minutemen and Their World (1976), this new work completes Gross's magisterial social history of the sleepy, yet significant town of Concord, Massachusetts, taking the story through the early republic and into the antebellum period. It is a model of exhaustive research, penetrating analysis, and moving prose, in many ways meeting the standards set by its predecessor. Yet Transcendentalists is also quite different from Minutemen in both scope and approach, reflecting how the broader field has developed in the ensuing three decades.If Minutemen and Their World’s primary argument was that the Revolution was fought in an attempt to conserve a culture that was slipping away, Transcendentalists and Their World is focused on change. At the heart of Gross's tale is a community moving away from the cohesive, unified, and communal society of pastor Ezra Ripley to the individualistic, experimental, and innovative world of iconoclasts Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But Gross is not anxious to get to his end result: the Transcendentalists do not arrive until three hundred pages into the book, as Part One: ``A Community in Change,'' which takes up half of the volume, is a detailed and meticulous social history of Concord during the 1820s. It is during that decade, Gross argues, that the foundations for Emerson and Thoreau were set.Part Two: ``The Transcendentalists and their World'' then focuses on the 1830s and 1840s, a period in which the community went through a profound transformation. The town split into competing religious denominations, several political parties vied for dominance, the evolving market upset traditional vocations, established social groups disintegrated and were replaced by more democratic alliances, and the topic of slavery threatened to disrupt any remaining sense of communal unity. Emerson and Thoreau are key players in this story, but they are never the sole protagonists. Indeed, because they do not appear in Part One, and are only role players in Part Two, the invocation of “Transcendentalists” in the book's title is a bit misleading. At the very least, the framing understates the project's breathtaking scope.Gross is especially successful at demonstrating how women played an often overlooked role in these reforms; in the Thoreau family Henry David lagged behind his sisters and aunts, women who were at the forefront of driving change. Though this was initially orchestrated through charitable societies (452–55), they soon became the primary movers once antislavery's organized reach arrived in town (521). Another hallmark of the book is its engagement with the role of ecclesiastical schisms and religious awakenings, including involving Thoreau (458) and Emerson (494).Perhaps the most distinct departure from Minutemen and Their World is Gross's awareness of how the seemingly parochial town was interwoven into an increasingly global marketplace. Even among Concordians, the myth of localism was decimated with the arrival of railroads that brought immigrants from Ireland, economic reliance on faraway merchants, and the rise of massive corporations in large cities. The result of these efforts was an unforeseen degree of economic inequality as land was owned by a decreasing amount of people.It is clear that, after nearly four decades of research, Gross is a master of these materials. Nearly every footnote is packed with detailed references to census records, town minutes, and other tools used by social historians to reconstruct the past. It would not be surprising if Gross could recite from memory any individual who lived, breathed, or died in Concord, as well as explain their connections to the many social networks that held the town together (or, in the end, tore it apart). Perhaps no other recent book has provided as detailed an account of one society and teased out its many meanings and legacies as Transcendentalists and the World.Yet in that tedium is also found the book's primary drawback. A key component to Minutemen and Their World was its compact nature, a triumph in condensing so much social history in such an efficient and breezy read. This brevity and precision made the work accessible to the general public and undergraduate students alike. The book's sequel, however, revels in its excess of information and analysis, resulting in its six hundred pages of text and another two hundred pages of endnotes. This not only pushes the work beyond what can typically be assigned in the classroom but also makes it difficult to glean the more important lessons that are subtly embedded within the work. It is more difficult for the reader to find the primary points when surrounded by so much material. One of his generation's best historians of antiquarians, Gross has grown closer to antiquarianism himself.Yet these are issues often inherent in classic texts when cultivated over an entire career. Transcendentalists and Their World is a landmark work in social history that will serve as a resource for all historians of nineteenth-century America and scholarly model for generations to come.