Botanical Index To The Journal Of Henry David Thoreau

Hands-on nature activities for the budding transcendentalist Author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau is best known for living two years along the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. He is also known for spending a night in jail for nonpayment of taxes, which he discussed in the influential essay "Civil Disobedience." More than 150 years later, people are still inspired by his thoughtful words about individual rights, social justice, and nature. His detailed plant observations have even proven to be a useful record for 21st-century botanists. Henry David Thoreau for Kids chronicles the short but influential life of this remarkable thinker. In addition to learning about Thoreau's contributions to our culture, young readers will participate in engaging, hands-on projects that bring his ideas to life. Activities include building a model of the Walden cabin, keeping a daily journal, planting a garden, baking trail-bread cakes, going on a half-day hike, and starting a rock collection. The book also includes a time line and list of resources—books, websites, and places to visit—which offer even more opportunities to connect with this fascinating man.

The first collection of Thoreau's writings on the flowering plants of Concord, with more than 200 drawings by renowned artist Barry Moser Some of Henry David Thoreau's most beautiful nature writing was inspired by the flowering trees and plants of Concord. An inveterate year-round rambler and journal keeper, he faithfully recorded, dated, and described his sightings of the floating water lily, the elusive wild azalea, and the late autumn foliage of the scarlet oak. This inviting selection of Thoreau's best flower writings is arranged by day of the year and accompanied by Thoreau's philosophical speculations and his observations of the weather and of other plants and animals. They illuminate the author's spirituality, his belief in nature's correspondence with the human soul, and his sense that anticipation--of spring, of flowers yet to bloom--renews our connection with the earth and with immortality. Thoreau's Wildflowers features more than 200 of the black-and-white drawings originally created by Barry Moser for his first illustrated book, Flowering Plants of Massachusetts. This volume also presents "Thoreau as Botanist," an essay by Ray Angelo, the leading authority on the flowering plants of Concord.

This is the inaugural volume in the first full-scale scholarly edition of Thoreau's correspondence in more than half a century. When completed, the edition's three volumes will include every extant letter written or received by Thoreau--in all, almost 650 letters, roughly 150 more than in any previous edition, including dozens that have never before been published. Correspondence 1 contains 163 letters, ninety-six written by Thoreau and sixty-seven to him. Twenty-five are collected here for the first time; of those, fourteen have never before been published. These letters provide an intimate view of Thoreau's path from college student to published author. At the beginning of the volume, Thoreau is a Harvard sophomore; by the end, some of his essays and poems have appeared in periodicals and he is at work on A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. The early part of the volume documents Thoreau's friendships with college classmates and his search for work after graduation, while letters to his brother and sisters reveal warm, playful relationships among the siblings. In May 1843, Thoreau moves to Staten Island for eight months to tutor a nephew of Emerson's. This move results in the richest period of letters in the volume: thirty-two by Thoreau and nineteen to him. From 1846 through 1848, letters about publishing and lecturing provide details about Thoreau's first years as a professional author. As the volume closes, the most ruminative and philosophical of Thoreau's epistolary relationships begins, that with Harrison Gray Otis Blake. Thoreau's longer letters to Blake amount to informal lectures, and in fact Blake invited a small group of friends to readings when these arrived. Following every letter, annotations identify correspondents, individuals mentioned, and books quoted, cited, or alluded to, and describe events to which the letters refer. A historical introduction characterizes the letters and connects them with the events of Thoreau's life, a textual introduction lays out the editorial principles and procedures followed, and a general introduction discusses the significance of letter-writing in the mid-nineteenth century and the history of the publication of Thoreau's letters. Finally, a thorough index provides comprehensive access to the letters and annotations.

Thoreau's major essays annotated and introduced by one of our most vital intellectuals. With The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Lewis Hyde gathers thirteen of Thoreau's finest short prose works and, for the first time in 150 years, presents them fully annotated and arranged in the order of their composition. This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of his 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin, an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror. Hyde diverges from the long-standing and dubious editorial custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, a division that has always obscured the ways in which the two are constantly entwined. "Natural History of Massachusetts" begins not with fish and birds but with a dismissal of the political world, and "Slavery in Massachusetts" ends with a meditation on the water lilies blooming on the Concord River. Thoreau's ideal reader was expected to be well versed in Greek and Latin, poetry and travel narrative, and politically engaged in current affairs. Hyde's detailed annotations clarify many of Thoreau's references and re-create the contemporary context wherein the nation's westward expansion was bringing to a head the racial tensions that would result in the Civil War.

This beautifully produced gift edition of Thoreaus journal has been carefullyselected and annotated by Jeffrey S. Cramer.

From 1837 to 1861 Thoreau kept a journal that began as a conventional record of ideas, grew into a writer's notebook, and eventually became the principal imaginative work of his career. The source of much of his published writing, the Journal is also a record of both his interior life and his monumental studies of the natural history of his native Concord, Massachusetts. In contrast to earlier editions, the Princeton Edition reproduces the Journal in its original and complete form, in a reading text that is free of editorial interpolations but keyed to a comprehensive scholarly apparatus. Covering an annual cycle from spring 1852 to late winter 1853, Journal 5 finds Thoreau intensely concentrating on detailed observations of natural phenomena and on "the mysterious relation between myself & these things" that he always strove to understand. Increasingly, the Journal attempts to balance a new found scientific professionalism and the accurate recording of phenological data with a firmly rooted belief in the spiritual correspondences that Nature reveals. Fittingly, the year of observation ends with Thoreau pondering an invitation to join the Association for the Advancement of Science, an invitation he ultimately declined in order to pursue his own life studies.

 Thoreau in his early career did not consider nature a worthy subject for his pen. Beginning with only a superficial knowledge of nature—even while living at Walden Pond—he later began to study the subject more intensely in 1849. Over the next dozen years, he applied himself especially to botany and ornithology, seeking to integrate knowledge into the larger patterns of life. Independently deriving what today would be considered an ecological worldview, Thoreau devoted the last years of his writing career to nature studies, written in his own distinctive voice. In this revised edition of a standard study of Thoreau and nature, the author traces the origins and development of Thoreau’s shift in viewpoint and his painstaking efforts thereafter.