Bøger af Laura Dassow Walls

Henry David Thoreau boasted in Walden that he had "travelled a good deal in Concord," his Massachusetts hometown. In reality, his lectures, surveying work, and natural explorations led him to select areas throughout New England, the American Northeast, and the Canadian East (Quebec). His recurring travels to the Maine Woods and Cape Cod were well documented and have been followed by "Thoreauvians" for decades. Not so, however, his 1861 "Journey West" with Horace Mann, Jr., which took the duo from Massachusetts to Minnesota and back. The details of this last, longest, and least-known of Thoreau's excursions were left veiled in mystery...until now. This is the story of two 19th-century men and a 21st-century woman who was determined to follow their 4,000-mile path.

Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. This title traces Humboldt's ideas for "Cosmos" to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world's people.

Ralph Waldo Emerson has traditionally been cast as a dreamer and a mystic, concerned with the ideals of transcendentalism rather than the realities of contemporary science and technology. In Laura Dassow Walls's view Emerson was a leader of the...