Journal Article

DENIZENS OF CONCORD

Bauerlein, Mark

2022

Overview

Why should this unexceptional town twenty miles west of Boston with no natural sublimity or intellectual history, no great universities or popular theaters or bustling coffeehouses, no patrons or publishers, have produced such a lasting body of writing in so brief a time, the first real cultural movement in America that counted in the worlds eyes? True, too, that when the Transcendentalists were there, the town had a proud historical claim as the site of \"the shot heard round the world\"-an episode at the center of Gross's previous book, The Minutemen and Their World (which won the Bancroft Prize for 1976). Since the mid-twentieth century, social history and cultural studies have explicitly renounced \"Great Man\" models of the past and aimed to track the course of things \"from the bottom up,\" that is, through the real lives of regular people, their jobs and finances, social habits and consumer goods, leisure preferences and sexual mores. Talk of Great Men and Great Books was for right-wing characters such as Thomas Carlyle (On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History) and Ezra Pound, who wrote, in The Spirit of Romance, \"The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or of mediocrity. .

• Publisher: Institute of Religion and Public Life
• Subject: Abolition of slavery / Abolitionists / Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881) / Christianity / Heroism & heroes / History / Pound, Ezra (1885-1972) / Religion / Society / Theological schools