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Join Author and Historian Robert A. Gross in conversation with Anke Voss, Curator of the CFPL William Munroe Special Collections. This session will feature The Transcendentalists and Their World, Robert Gross’s long-awaited study of Concord in the era of Emerson and Thoreau. In The Transcendentalists and Their World, historian Robert Gross gives a rich and beautifully detailed account of the town that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called home. Their Concord, he shows, was primed for revolt, hardly a sleepy, bucolic place fit only for poets and philosophers.

Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Minutemen and Their World (1976), winner of the Bancroft Prize, and of Books and Libraries in Thoreau’s Concord (1988); with Mary Kelley, he is coeditor of An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (2010). A former assistant editor of Newsweek, he has written for such periodicals as Esquire, Harper’s, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times. His essays have appeared in The American Scholar, New England Quarterly, Raritan, and Yale Review.

Anke Voss joined the Concord Free Public Library staff as the new Curator for the William Munroe Special Collections in early October 2019. Anke received both a B.A. in History and an M.A. in United States Political, Social, and Women’s History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Anke completed her Master's Degree in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives and Preservation Management at the State University of New York at Albany.