Robert A. Gross will present a 2-session class on his books on American Independence and Transcendentalism with the 92nd Street Y.

Register here through our Events Calendar to receive a discount code, which provides half-price admission for Concord residents. Once you have the code, register here for the course and enter the code at checkout.

We invite you to join us for a unique, two-part series on Concord’s “two revolutions:” the beginning of the War of Independence at Concord’s North Bridge on April 19, 1775 and the assertion of American intellectual independence in the Transcendentalists movement of the 1830s and 1840s. These classes will be filmed at the Concord Free Public Library.

In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, Gross returns to Concord to explore the rise of Transcendentalism in The Transcendentalists and Their World as an equally crucial moment in the American story, when Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Alcotts challenged a world of inherited institutions with a new premium on autonomy and choice. “Gross contextualizes the transcendental thinking of Emerson and Thoreau. Their insights—on nature, on resisting the status quo, on being—endure, and this work by Gross will endure as well," writes Ken Burns.

This class is presented in collaboration with New York City’s 92nd Street Y. Founded 147 years ago to serve the Jewish people, 92nd Street Y promotes individual and family development and participation in civic life within the context of Jewish values and American pluralism. As a nonprofit community and cultural center, 92nd Street Y seeks to create, provide and disseminate programs of distinction that foster the physical and mental health of human beings throughout their lives, their educational and spiritual growth and their enjoyment. 92nd Street Y reaches out beyond its core constituency of American Jews to serve people of diverse racial, religious, ethnic and economic backgrounds, seeking partnerships that leaven our programs and broaden our influence.