Emerson and Thoreau led a second independence movement – this time of thought
In 1976, Robert A. Gross published “The Minutemen and Their World,” a groundbreaking piece of scholarship about the origins of the American Revolution. Rather than telling the story through accounts of a few Founding Fathers, Gross dramatically broadened his narrative to include rank-and-file colonists, “recovering,” writes Gross, “the thoughts and actions of common folk.” This kind of social history, a revolution of its own when “The Minutemen” appeared, is now a part of the literary mainstream.
Gross is up to something similar in “The Transcendentalists and Their World,” a kind of sequel to his
