Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World
1984; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1017/s0021875800016844
ISSN1469-5154
Autores Tópico(s)Thoreau and American Literature
ResumoThe town of Concord, Massachusetts, is widely celebrated in American culture as a pastoral place. It was the home of the Minutemen, the “embattled farmers” who fought the Redcoats at the Old North Bridge and launched the War for Independence. More than a half-century later, it became the bucolic center of the American Renaissance, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau waged their own revolutions of the spirit. In these terms, Concord readily plays its part within the longstanding American opposition between country and city, serving as the timeless small town, the symbolic guardian of that rural simplicity and love of liberty so regularly invoked in times of crisis to recall a complex urban-industrial nation to its roots. Even today, when the town numbers some 16,000 people, Concordians like to picture their community as a “climate for freedom.”
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