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Henry David Thoreau’s encounter with Cape Cod begins with a scene of chaos. He writes, “…we found that the Provincetown steamer, which should have got in the day before, had not yet arrived, on account of a violent storm; and, as we noticed in the streets a handbill headed, ‘Death! 145 lives lost at Cohasset!’ we decided to go by way of Cohasset.”¹ Coming upon the wreck of the brig St. John, Thoreau is confronted with a vast morgue, and is stunned by the chaotic destruction rendered to the ship by the sea. “The largest timbers and iron braces were broken superfluously,...

  The town of Concord, Massachusetts, is widely known as the home of Minutemen and Transcendentalists. It is the place where “embattled farmers” fired “the shot heard ‘round the world” on the 19th of April 1775, and launched the war for political independence. It is equally famous as the residence of the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who more than a half-century later, waged a second American revolution for intellectual and spiritual independence. But had you come to this small town of some two thousand souls, sixteen miles west of Boston, in the mid-1820s to mark...

On December 27, 1854, Henry Thoreau traveled to Nantucket Island to give a lecture titled “What Shall it Profit?” According to the advertisement in the December 8, 1854, edition of The Inquirer, one of the two island newspapers at the time, he was to speak as part of a “course of Lectures before the Proprietors of the Nantucket Atheneum.” The advertisement went on to say, “The Committee have limited the number of tickets, that the Hall may not be crowded.”  A good turnout was...

In a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, "10 Things You Might Not Know about Fear," Mark Jacob and Stephan Benzkofer mentioned the relatively obscure origins of FDR's famous declaration in the face of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!" As Jacob and Benzkofer report, Eleanor Roosevelt was once asked about the origins of this frequently quoted sentence in her husband's first...