World of Walden Pond: Transcendentalism in the Age of Reform

World of Walden Pond examines the 19th century phenomenon of Transcendentalism: America’s most romanticized social, religious, philosophical, and literary movement. Focusing especially on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, we’ll examine Transcendentalism in the age of reform and evaluate how a small group of individuals responded to and help shape abolition, feminism, and environmentalism. The central problem Transcendentalists wrestled with will be our focus, too: how to reconcile a desire for individualism with the need for collective action.