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[5678] Currier & Ives, Battle of Buena Vista. Fought Feby. 23rd, 1847. In Which the American Army Under Gen. Taylor Were Completely Victorious (1847), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-2957].
Considered by many of his fellow townspeople to be a loafer, Thoreau worked from time to time in his father’s pencil factory, but the dust from the graphite aggravated the tuberculosis he would later die from. His legacy continues to inspire social and environmental activists. Thoreau’s early biographies and published works attracted the attention of European socialists and Labor Party members, and his essays “Resistance to Civil Government” and “Life Without Principle” influenced Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle for Indian independence and were also inspiring to Martin Luther King Jr. in his efforts to gain broader civil rights for African Americans. Edward Abbey, naturalist and author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, is among the many environmental writers Thoreau inspired. Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, the story of a young man who journeys alone into the Alaskan wilderness, pays homage to Thoreau’s naturalist philosophy but shows what can happen if his ideas are taken too far.
[1031] Anonymous, Emerson’s Grave (1850-1920),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-D4-72358].
Emerson is buried on Author’s Ridge in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery of Concord, Massachusetts, alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott. His epitaph, “The passive master lent his hand to the vast soul that o’er him planned,” comes from his poem “The Problem.”
[5678] Currier & Ives, Battle of Buena Vista. Fought Feby. 23rd, 1847. In Which the American Army Under Gen. Taylor Were Completely Victorious (1847),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-2957].
Painting of the Battle of Buena Vista, led by General Zachary Taylor. This popular scene of one of the major American victories of the war spoke to America’s belief in Manifest Destiny. Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay his poll tax, which would have helped finance the Mexican War.
[6964] Anonymous, Thoreau’s Cove, Lake Walden, Concord, Mass. (n.d.),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-D4-34878DLC].
Photograph of woods and pond. Henry David Thoreau lived in a small cabin by Walden Pond for two years and wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden.
[7226] John Carlos Rowe, Interview: “Nature in the Slave Narrative Versus the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau” (2001),
courtesy of American Passages and Annenberg Media.
Professor of English and comparative studies John Carlos Rowe discusses the differences between the depiction of nature in Transcendentalist works and in slave narratives: in one genre, nature is a place for calm meditation; in the other, it is a place of terror.
[8581] John Carlos Rowe, Interview: “The Transcendental Critique of America” (2002),
courtesy of American Passages and Annenberg Media.
Professor John Carlos Rowe discusses the way in which the Transcendentalists criticized the American thirst for profit at the expense of nature and a high quality of life.