The Atlantic Magazine Features Article by Two Thoreau Society Members
“Why Concord?”, an article by long-time Thoreauvians Robert A. Gross, PhD, and Robert M. Thorson, PhD, appears in the November 2025 issue of The Atlantic.
Known to their friends as Bob and Thor, Professors Gross and Thorson have each served as board members of the Thoreau Society and have published widely praised books on Thoreau and Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World by Gross was published in 2021, while Thorson is the author of The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years (2017) and The Guide to Walden Pond (2018).
“Why Concord?” appears as part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” an Atlantic magazine project that explores 250 years of the American experiment. Gross and Thorson explore why the small town of Concord became symbolically central to two revolutions: “forcible resistance to British aggression” and a philosophy that came to be known as Transcendentalism.
The authors suggest that Concord’s community, culture, and history as well as its geographic features combined to make it an iconic touchstone in American identity.
“Concord was lucky in its location, inheriting advantages from natural landscape and history on which its inhabitants could build a sense of place and community,” write the authors.
“It was a fierce determination to defend that community, with its tradition of town-meeting government, that inspired the resistance to the British regulars.”
The article also examines how Concord’s landscapes, natural features, and local culture provided an environment conducive to the Transcendentalists’ ideas about self‑reliance, nature, and individualism.
Concord “was a place fit for poets and philosophers, where nature and man came together in rare harmony,” write the authors. The inspiration came from the wildness of the Great Meadow, the marshlands and woodlands, the rivers, and the deepest lake in Massachusetts, Walden Pond.
This article continues The Atlantic magazine’s long history of articles about Concord and Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as about Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s essays “Wild Apples” and “Autumnal Tints” were first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862, as was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s posthumous tribute to Thoreau. In 1909 an Atlantic article by John Burroughs maintained that Thoreau “was a literary force which made for plain living and high thinking.” In 1896 Bradford Torrey praised Thoreau in the magazine for his “ceaseless observation of the landscape.”
Read the article on the Atlantic website. (Requires a subscription or starting a free trial.)