Laura Dassow Walls's Books

Henry David Thoreau

A Life

By: Laura Dassow Walls

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Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls renews Henry David Thoreau for us in all his profound, inspiring complexity. Drawing on Thoreau's copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive, full of quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him. "The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.--Dust jacket.

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670

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

022659937X

ISBN 13

9780226599373

The Passage to Cosmos

Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

By: Laura Dassow Walls

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The Passage to Cosmos

Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

By: Laura Dassow Walls

Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very idea of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry. Humboldt’s science laid the foundations for ecology and inspired the theories of his most important scientific disciple, Charles Darwin. In the United States, his ideas shaped the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman. They helped spark the American environmental movement through followers like John Muir and George Perkins Marsh. And they even bolstered efforts to free the slaves and honor the rights of Indians. Laura Dassow Walls here traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt’s transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities. To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself “half an American,” but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. The Passage to Cosmos will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.

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421

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226871843

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9780226871844

Emerson's Life in Science

The Culture of Truth

By: Laura Dassow Walls

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Emerson's Life in Science

The Culture of Truth

By: Laura Dassow Walls

Ralph Waldo Emerson has traditionally been cast as a dreamer and a mystic, concerned with the ideals of transcendentalism rather than the realities of contemporary science and technology. In Laura Dassow Walls's view Emerson was a leader of the secular avant-garde in his day. He helped to establish science as the popular norm of truth in America and to modernize American popular thought. In addition, he became a hero to a post-Darwinian generation of Victorian Dissenters, exemplifying the strong connection between transcendentalism and later nineteenth-century science.In his early years as a minister, Emerson read widely in natural philosophy (or physics), chemistry, geology, botany, and comparative anatomy. When he left the church, it was to seek the truths written in the book of nature rather than in books of scripture. While visiting the Paris Museum of Natural History during his first European tour, Emerson experienced a revelation so intense that he declared, "I will be a naturalist." Once he was back in the United States, his first step in realizing this ambition was to deliver a series of lectures on natural science. These lectures formed the basis for his first publication, Nature (1836), and his writings ever after reflected his intense and continuing interest in science.Walls finds that Emerson matured just as the concept of "the two cultures" emerged, when the disciplines of literature and science were divorcing each other even as he called repeatedly for their marriage. Consequently, Walls writes, half of Emerson's thought has been invisible to us: science was central to Emerson, to his language, to the basic organization of his career. In Emerson's Life in Science, she makes the case that no study of literary history can be complete without embracing science as part of literature. Conversely, she maintains, no history of science is complete unless we consider the role played by writers of literature who helped to install science in the popular imagination.

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291

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Cornell University Press

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ISBN 10

1501717391

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9781501717390

Emerson's Life in Science

The Culture of Truth

By: Laura Dassow Walls

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Emerson's Life in Science

The Culture of Truth

By: Laura Dassow Walls

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Cornell University Press

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1501717391

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9781501717390

The Passage to Cosmos

Alexander Von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

By: Laura Dassow Walls

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The Passage to Cosmos

Alexander Von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

By: Laura Dassow Walls

Humboldt offered the world a vision of humans & nature as integrated halves of a single whole. He espoused the idea that while the univerise of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty & order are human achievements. Laura Dassow Walls traces the emergence of this philosophy to Humboldt's 1799 journey to America.

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421

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226871835

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9780226871837

Gale Researcher Guide for: Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Prose

By: Laura Zebuhr

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Gale Researcher Guide for: Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Prose

By: Laura Zebuhr

Gale Researcher Guide for: Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Prose is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

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Gale, Cengage Learning

ISBN 10

1535848006

ISBN 13

9781535848008

Henry David Thoreau

A Life

By: Laura Dassow Walls

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Henry David Thoreau

A Life

By: Laura Dassow Walls

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670

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University of Chicago Press

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022659937X

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9780226599373

Seeing New Worlds

Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science

By: Laura Dassow Walls

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Seeing New Worlds

Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science

By: Laura Dassow Walls

Thoreau was a poet, a naturalist, a major American writer. Was he also a scientist? He was, Laura Dassow Walls suggests. Her book, the first to consider Thoreau as a serious and committed scientist, will change the way we understand his accomplishment and the place of science in American culture. Walls reveals that the scientific texts of Thoreau’s day deeply influenced his best work, from Walden to the Journal to the late natural history essays. Here we see how, just when literature and science were splitting into the “two cultures” we know now, Thoreau attempted to heal the growing rift. Walls shows how his commitment to Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific approach resulted in not only his “marriage” of poetry and science but also his distinctively patterned nature studies. In the first critical study of his “The Dispersion of Seeds” since its publication in 1993, she exposes evidence that Thoreau was using Darwinian modes of reasoning years before the appearance of Origin of Species. This book offers a powerful argument against the critical tradition that opposes a dry, mechanistic science to a warm, “organic” Romanticism. Instead, Thoreau’s experience reveals the complex interaction between Romanticism and the dynamic, law-seeking science of its day. Drawing on recent work in the theory and philosophy of science as well as literary history and theory, Seeing New Worlds bridges today’s “two cultures” in hopes of stimulating a fuller consideration of representations of nature.

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318

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Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0299147436

ISBN 13

9780299147433

Gale Researcher Guide for: Transcendentalist Literature

By: Laura A. Leibman

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Gale Researcher Guide for: Transcendentalist Literature

By: Laura A. Leibman

Gale Researcher Guide for: Transcendentalist Literature is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

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1535848804

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9781535848800

Ecological Restoration and the U.S. Nature and Environmental Writing Tradition

A Rewilding of American Letters

By: Laura Smith

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Ecological Restoration and the U.S. Nature and Environmental Writing Tradition

A Rewilding of American Letters

By: Laura Smith

This book presents a critical history of the intersections between American environmental literature and ecological restoration policy and practice. Through a storying—restorying—restoring framework, this book explores how entanglements between writers and places have produced literary interventions in restoration politics. The book considers the ways literary landscapes are politicized by writers themselves, and by conservationists, activists, policymakers, and others, in defense of U.S. public lands and the idea of wilderness. The book profiles five environmental writers and examines how their writings on nature, wildness, wilderness, conservation, preservation, and restoration have variously inspired and been translated into ecological restoration programs and campaigns by environmental organizations. The featured authors are Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) at Walden Pond, John Muir (1838–1914) in Yosemite National Park, Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) at his family’s Wisconsin sand farm, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890–1998) in the Everglades, and Edward Abbey (1927–1989) in Glen Canyon. This book combines environmental history, literature, biography, philosophy, and politics in a commentary on considering (and developing) environmental literature’s place in conversations on restoration ecology, ecological restoration, and rewilding.

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348

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Springer Nature

Published Date

ISBN 10

3030861481

ISBN 13

9783030861483

Gale Researcher Guide for: Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Prose

By: Laura Zebuhr

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Gale Researcher Guide for: Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Prose

By: Laura Zebuhr

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Gale, Cengage Learning

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Book's by Laura Dassow Walls

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

The Passage to Cosmos

The Passage to Cosmos

Emerson's Life in Science

Emerson's Life in Science

Emerson's Life in Science

Emerson's Life in Science

The Passage to Cosmos

The Passage to Cosmos

Gale Researcher Guide for: Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Prose

Gale Researcher Guide for: Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Prose

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Seeing New Worlds

Seeing New Worlds

Gale Researcher Guide for: Transcendentalist Literature

Gale Researcher Guide for: Transcendentalist Literature

Ecological Restoration and the U.S. Nature and Environmental Writing Tradition

Ecological Restoration and the U.S. Nature and Environmental Writing Tradition

Gale Researcher Guide for: Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Prose

Gale Researcher Guide for: Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Prose

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