Why Concord?
Concord is a remarkable landmark site where Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, Alcott, Ripley and many others wrote, lectured, and discussed a variety of subjects including philosophy, religion, ethics, literature, politics, and the value of social reform. These pioneers in American letters have become known as the Transcendentalists. As a landmark, Concord is unique in that it features so many sites associated with this special group, including the School of Philosophy, the Concord Museum, the Concord Free Public Library, and the homes of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Alcott. It is also the location, of course, of Walden Pond. All of these sites are within a two-mile radius of Concord’s town center. Major manuscript and archival collections associated with the Transcendentalists are to be found at the Concord Public Library, the Concord Museum, and the nearby Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. |
 Bronson Alcott’s School of Philosophy will host participants for workshop lectures. |
November 2009 Dear Colleague, It is a pleasure to invite you to Concord, Massachusetts, the home—as local Concordians like to say—of America’s “second Revolution” (as well as, of course, its first). Some sixty years after the “shot heard round the world” was fired at the North Bridge, an extraordinary confluence of literary and social forces brought together the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Amos Bronson Alcott and his soon-to-become more famous daughter, Louisa May, in the village of Concord. The result was a second “revolution” that forever changed the American literary and cultural landscape. This workshop provides the opportunity to spend one week in one of the most historic towns in America—a town that proudly reveres and celebrates its unique literary and cultural heritage. Our workshop, “Concord, Massachusetts: A Center of Transcendentalism and Social Reform in the 19th Century,” is sponsored by the `Community College Humanities Association’ (CCHA) and is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of its `Landmarks of American History and Culture’ initiative. Each one-week workshop provides the opportunity to work with five scholars, each of them actively engaged in teaching and research. Daily seminars, private guided visits to Concord’s many literary and historic sites, and stimulating interactions with colleagues from all over the country constitute the core of the one-week workshop. The extensive holdings of the Concord Free Public Library are also available to participants interested in developing research projects. |
The Old North Bridge, site of the “shot heard round the world.” |
Faculty participants, selected nationally, will develop individual classroom teaching projects, or work on an individual research project using workshop and archival resources. Participants will be asked at the end of the week to report on specific teaching strategies or curriculum units inspired by the workshop that they anticipate bringing back to their classrooms. Participants will be able to share teaching modules with other community college faculty by posting them on the CCHA web site. Five faculty participants will be invited to present their teaching modules or research in concurrent sessions at the CCHA national conference in October 2010. Cover letter and participant guidelines, full text
|
|
|
For more information, please contact: Sterling Delano: Martha Holder: |
|
