Event

The Transcendentalists and Their World

Monday, December 13, 2021 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM EST
At MHS

Robert Gross, University of Connecticut, in conversation with Catherine Allgor, MHS

Bancroft Prize winning author Robert Gross presents a fresh view of the Transcendentalists; thinkers whose impact on philosophy and literature would spread from Concord, Mass, to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts lived in Concord, but the town was no pastoral idyll fit for poets and philosophers. The small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled by capitalism, democracy, and integration into the wider world. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into a small community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths.

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Hybrid Event

MHS maintains a high standard of Covid protection. We require all people entering our building to wear a mask while in a public space and anyone who will be in the building for a significant period of time (i.e. more than making a delivery) must provide proof of vaccination.

Upcoming Events

Social Reform and Identity Formation in the 17th Century - A Panel Discussion
Social Reform and Identity Formation in the 17th Century - A Panel Discussion
Hybrid / NOTE: times are shown in EST
Tuesday, April 1, 2025 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM EST
This panel investigates forms of social control in 17th century New England. Arthur George Kamya’s paper examines the regulation of distilled liquor in 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony, exploring how authorities navigated competing moral, economic, and security imperatives. Initially targeting a cross-section of colonists, liquor laws evolved to focus on servants, Native Americans, and eventually African Americans. The colony's approach shifted from moral censure to pragmatic revenue generation, with officials using fines and licenses to fund government operations. Kamya’s study illuminates how alcohol regulation became a tool of social control, state-building, and the construction of racial hierarchies in colonial New England, offering insights into the complex interplay between commerce, governance, and identity formation in early America. As discussed in Alice King’s work, Connecticut adopted a notable strategy towards certain Indigenous populations during the initial decades of settlement, attempting to control and exploit Native communities by turning them into colonial tributaries who would provide essential supplies, wampum, and military aid. King’s paper considers the evolution of tributary politics at the end of the seventeenth century after the Dominion of New England and Glorious Revolution had destabilized colonial authority and left colonists vulnerable to attack by French and Native forces, including the Wabanaki Confederacy during King William’s War, 1689-1697, when Connecticut leaders sought to raise soldiers for New England’s defense from these historic tributary communities.
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