Concord Welcomes The 81st Annual Gathering of The Thoreau Society

BY MICHAEL FREDERICK

The Thoreau Society was founded in 1941 to stimulate interest in and foster education about Thoreau’s life, works, and legacy and his place in his world and ours; to encourage research on Thoreau’s life and writings; to act as a repository for Thoreauviana and material relevant to Thoreau; and to advocate for the preservation of Thoreau Country. The Annual Gathering is an opportunity to come together and share knowledge, recognize accomplishments, and challenge ourselves to live more deliberately.

This year’s Gathering will welcome more than 90 presenters speaking on a variety of topics from “The International Thoreau” to “Thoreau and the Poetry of Life.” Guided tours of Walden Pond, the Concord Museum, and the Special Collections of Concord Free Public Library will take attendees behind the scenes. Here are just a few of the exciting events planned for this year’s Gathering.

It is a great privilege to honor Rebecca Solnit and Lawrence Buell with the Thoreau Society Medal, the Society’s highest honor, which recognizes “sustained, essential contributions to the legacy and vitality of Thoreauvian studies and ideals through extraordinary scholarship or service.”

Solnit is being honored for her urgent and deeply compelling writings about Thoreau and for the manifold ways that her body of work, in general, translates Thoreau’s legacy and commitments into new and necessary contexts. Solnit is the author of more than twenty books and has served as a columnist for Harper’s, the Guardian, and other venues. Her writings range widely from environmental, technological, and aesthetic histories to meditations on politics and praxis (with emphases on environmental justice, gender, native sovereignty, and civil disobedience) to memoir.

Lawrence Buell is being honored for his distinguished career and body of work devoted to the writings of the New England Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and the American Renaissance. Buell’s works include Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond (2001), Emerson (2003), and The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). He is co-editor, with Wai Chee Dimock, of Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007). In 2008, he delivered the Dana S. Brigham Memorial Keynote Address, “The Individual and the State: The Politics of Thoreau in Our Time,” during the Annual Gathering. He serves on the Thoreau Farm Trust Advisory Board.

When Margaret Fuller died tragically in the wreck of the Elizabeth off Fire Island in 1850, she was the most famous woman in the United States, and she was a transatlantic celebrity. Henry David Thoreau went to the wreck site and searched for her papers which would have yielded a history of the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849.

She had covered the revolutionary government as a foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley’s Tribune. Her celebrity was founded on Woman In The Nineteenth Century, which had begun as an article for The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal that Emerson had put under her editorship. Emerson, Willam Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clark collaborated on the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli as a final tribute to their friendship.

Now Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Revolutionary (64 min) offers a twenty-first century take on this extraordinary woman and her enduring influence as writer and radical. Four scholars discuss her life and times in an engaging interplay highlighted with music and images. Two of the scholars are biographers, one of whom won the Bancroft Prize and the other a Pulitzer. Follow her life from her unique education through her association with the Transcendentalists to her exciting romantic sojourn in Italy and her legacy, which truly makes her a woman of the twenty-first century.

Jesse Paris Smith is a writer, activist, musician, producer, and co-founder of Pathway to Paris. She has been composing, performing, recording, touring, and collaborating with other musicians and artists globally since 2004. In 2014, Jesse and cellist Rebecca Foon founded Pathway to Paris, a non-profit organization dedicated to turning the Paris Agreement into reality and offering tangible solutions for combatting global climate change, helping cities to design and implement ambitious climate action plans to go 100% renewable/zero emissions by 2040. She is on the Associate Board of Tibet House US, where she has co-curated and hosted events and has performed many times at their annual benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. In light of the Himalayan earthquake in April 2015, she founded Everest Awakening, an initiative which leads various projects on the ground in Nepal and Tibet.

Brister Freeman (1744 - 1822) was enslaved in Concord for thirty-five years before serving three tours in the Continental Army and thereby taking the freedom he asserted in the surname he chose for himself. After the Revolution, Freeman and his wife Fenda anchored a small but determined community of formerly enslaved people in Walden Woods, for which both were later memorialized by Henry David Thoreau in Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Harvard University has recently acknowledged that Freeman’s stolen labor directly enriched the university in the form of a bequest from his Concord enslaver for the founding of its medical school. Now the Thoreau Society and The Robbins House are co-hosting a homecoming ceremony on the 200th anniversary of Brister Freeman’s death, organized by social justice advocate Steven Flythe and Black Walden author Elise Lemire and presided over by the Reverend Bertram Johnson. There will be a keynote address by Cambridge’s former mayor and current NAACP president Kenneth Reeves, poetry by Danielle Georges, and kora music by John Hughes. This event is free and open to the public.

The Annual Gathering will take place July 6 – 10, 2022. All are welcome to attend either in person or via Zoom. Visit thoreausociety.org for more information and to register.

Michael Frederick is Executive Director of The Thoreau Society.