Few books have been as heavily anticipated within the academic community as Robert Gross's The Transcendentalists and Their World. The sequel to The Minutemen and Their World (1976), this new work completes Gross's magisterial social history of the sleepy, yet significant town of Concord, Massachusetts, taking the story through the early republic and into the antebellum period. It is a model of exhaustive research, penetrating analysis, and moving prose, in many ways meeting the standards set by its predecessor. Yet Transcendentalists is also quite different from Minutemen in both scope and approach, reflecting how the broader field has developed in the ensuing three decades.
If Minutemen and Their World’s primary argument was that the Revolution was fought in an attempt to conserve a culture that was slipping away, Transcendentalists and Their World is focused on change. At the heart of Gross's tale is a community moving away from...