Quotes from Robert A. Gross

Emerson long resisted a public stand on behalf of abolitionism

he also recruited another of Emerson's intimates, Margaret Fuller (no relation to the headmaster), to the teaching staff. It

1847 Concord contributed $382 to the New England Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland.

Under President Josiah Quincy, Harvard turned its back on the citizenry as a whole to focus on the sons of the Hub's wealthy merchants and financiers.

Emerson put the development of the individual, rather than service to society, at the heart of his educational vision.

The year 1835 was the year of the "antis," when all the hostilities provoked by a changing society surged together to produce a climate hostile to free speech.

Anti-Masonry was thus a populist revolt of a sort that would reverberate across the centuries.

a community riven by factions and sects, the very advances of the age at once opened new prospects for personal fulfillment and weakened the bonds of interdependence still more. These changes would also prepare the social and cultural ground for the individualism of Emerson and Thoreau.

In a wider world of political conflict, the town meeting was a haven of consensus.17

The old bonds of language, country, and king give way to the new connexions of trade. It destroys patriotism and substitutes cosmopolitanism.

I have never got over my surprise," Thoreau once reflected, "that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too.

Concord village was an outpost of urban civilization in the countryside.