Concord, Massachusetts: Transcendentalism and Social Action in Antebellum America

FAIN: BI-50123-10

Community College Humanities Association (Baltimore, MD 21237-3899)
Sterling Delano (Project Director: March 2010 to April 2016)
Martha Holder (Co Project Director: March 2010 to April 2016)

Two one-week Landmarks workshops for fifty community college faculty members on the Transcendentalists and nineteenth-century reform movements in Concord and its vicinity.

Our workshop places special emphasis on Concord's enduring importance in the realm of social reform action in antebellum America. This importance was stimulated particularly by the Transcendentalists' involvement in the anti-slavery and women's rights movements. And although it is often casually assumed that their entire focus consisted of high-minded theories about reform, participants in the workshops quickly discover that the Transcendentalists put their thoughts into concrete forms of action. Nowhere, perhaps, is their concern for concrete action more clearly demonstrated than in their reform activities. Brook Farm, Fruitlands, Walden, and the work of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society remind us that the Transcendentalists and those associated with them--were anything but armchair philosophers.