Hosted by the University of Connecticut's

Connecticut State Museum of Natural History and Connecticut Archaeology Center

 

Making Sense of Walden, by Robert A. Gross

December 4, 2005, 3:00pm

UConn, Storrs, CT

On Sunday, December 4, 2005, at 3 pm, the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History and Connecticut Archaeology Center at UConn will offer a lecture entitled “Making Sense of Walden,” by Dr. Robert Gross, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History in UConn's Department of History. The talk will take place in Room 130 of UConn’s Biological Sciences and Physics Building, 91 North Eagleville Road, Storrs. Park in North Parking Garage (fee). Admission is free. For information, call the Connecticut Archeology Center at (860) 486-4460.

Why did Henry David Thoreau go to live in Walden woods from 1845 to 1847, and what did he make of that experience? This talk will place Thoreau's experiment in "deliberate living" in the context of his life and that of his native Concord and New England, and it will explore how he transformed that experience into a literary classic and foundation text of the environmental movement.

Dr. Gross specializes in U.S. social and cultural history, the American Revolution, Transcendentalism, and New England studies. He has received many honors including fellowships from the Guggenheim, Howard and Rockefeller Foundations. His book, The Minutemen and Their World, won the Bancroft Prize in American History. He is also author of The Transcendentalists and Their World, a social and cultural history of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and the Concord, Massachusetts community in which they lived. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1976.