โ Scribed by Sackman, Douglas Cazaux
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden's less famous sibling, virtually all the metaphors and similes draw on natural imagery. The "higher regions of literature," Thoreau says, are like the summit of Saddle-back Mountain "above storm and darkness." "History," meanwhile, "fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening" (1998: 181, 123).
Thoreau was as independent-minded as they come, but he was also, like all of us, embedded in his historical moment. Though we often still think of him as a recluse and a nay-sayer, we might just as easily emphasize how representative he was of mid-nineteenth-century American culture -a culture whose defining characteristic, one could argue, was an active engagement with the environment. Think of the popular paintings of the Hudson River School; think of the "rural" cemetery movement, which gave the country its first urban parks in the 1830s and 1840s; think of the thriving horticultural societies and natural history clubs; think of works by William
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
When I fi rst thought about studying US cultural history, the antebellum period seemed a rather unlikely place to set up shop. In the broader sweep of American culture, these were the decades known as early or mid-"Victorian," a period typically defi ned by its rigid social strictures and cast as do