Henry Thoreau’S Journal for 1837 (Æt
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HDT WHAT? INDEX 1838 1838 EVENTS OF 1837 General Events of 1838 SPRING JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH SUMMER APRIL MAY JUNE FALL JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER WINTER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years. –Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN 1838 January February March Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 1 2 3 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 28 29 30 31 25 26 27 28 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 April May June Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 29 30 27 28 29 30 31 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 EVENTS OF 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX 1838 1838 July August September Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 1 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 29 30 31 26 27 28 29 30 31 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 October November December Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 1 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 28 29 30 31 25 26 27 28 29 30 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1837 (æt. 20) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1838 (æt. 20-21) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1839 (æt. 21-22) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1840 (æt. 22-23) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1841 (æt. 23-24) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1842 (æt. 24-25) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1845-1846 (æt. 27-29) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1845-1847 (æt. 27-30) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1837-1847 (æt. 20-30) “HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1838 1838 22D STANZA: 1838/1839 Henry Thoreau’s 22d stanza began on his birthday, July 12th, Thursday, 1838. The Thoreau family apparently did not make much of holidays or birthdays — but this was a birthday we now consider symbolic, the 21st — the day after which in our culture every male is entitled to profess himself a grown man. The question would be, however, whether by the year 1838 such a 21st birthday was being regarded as the gateway to full adulthood, or whether that able-to-drink-alcohol cultural artifact is of a more recent provenance. And if it were already the convention, why is there not something reported as going on, similar to the “chiving” that goes on now as a young man approaches that transition-to-full-adulthood milestone? In the JOURNAL, and in various other historical records I have been consulting, one detects none of this sort of chiving. • Henry Thoreau lost a tooth. • His brother John reopened the defunct Concord Academy and he became a teacher there. The family was living in the Parkman House on the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building. It was in this home that they would hold this school. • An exhibition of hot-air balloon ascension toured Massachusetts. • The rather humorlessly self-righteous James Russell Lowell was rusticating in Concord during this year, having been temporarily expelled from Harvard College for some infraction of college regulations. He was being tutored by the utterly humorlessly self-righteous Reverend Barzillai Frost. They must have made quite a pair! • At Harvard College, Gore Hall was constructed. • Little Louisa May Alcott, about age 5, who had already while a toddler almost drowned in the Boston frogpond, wandered away from home and was found late in the evening by a town crier, huddled on a doorstep in Bedford Street. • The 1st Universalist Society of Concord was gathered. • A Nonresistance Society was formed in Boston, all the members of which were abolitionists because they understood slavery to be a form of violence. • The United States House of Representatives resolved not to accept any more antislavery petitions. • Start of the “Underground Railroad.” • The Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson began his Boston Quarterly Review. • The Reverend William Ellery Channing suggested that the primary focus of our energies should be toward our own rectification, rather than the rectification of society. The Reverend Brownson retorted that systemic societal problems can never be rectified through self-culture. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1838 1838 • Some 200 trees were being planted along the road to the Battle Monument. A burial site for the fallen redcoats in Concord or Lexington was disturbed by a phrenologist who would use the skulls he obtained as exhibits. BACKGROUND EVENTS OF 1838 BACKGROUND EVENTS OF 1839 THE RHODE-ISLAND ALMANAC FOR 1838. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: Hugh H. Brown. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1838 1838 While the rather humorlessly self-righteous James Russell Lowell was rusticating in Concord, Massachusetts during this year, having been temporarily expelled from Harvard College for some infraction of college regulations. He was being tutored by the utterly humorlessly self-righteous Reverend Barzillai Frost. They must have made quite a pair! In this year Lowell would graduate from Harvard as Class Poet despite being quite unable to attend his Class Day and deliver the poem which he had composed for the occasion because he HDT WHAT? INDEX 1838 1838 was being ostracized in Concord, so the poem would be published in Cambridge by Metcalf, Torry & Ballou. One of the poetaster’s biographers would speak of this poem as “immortalizing, to Lowell’s later regret, his reactionary tendencies and sophomoric opposition to the new thoughts and reforms then coming into fashion [such as] Transcendentalism, abolition, woman’s rights, and temperance … Typical of the poem’s style … are these lines directed against Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had just delivered his famous address before the Divinity College students in Cambridge … [lines the level of which] never rises above that of diatribe: they are abusive in their denunciation, unmemorable in phrasing, and humorlessly self-righteous”: They call such doctrines startling, strange, and new, But then they’re his, you know, and must be true; The universal mind requires a change, Its insect wings must have a wider range, It wants no mediator — it can face In its own littleness the Throne of Grace; WALDO EMERSON For miracles and “such things” ’t is too late, To trust in them is now quite out of date, They’re all explainable by nature’s laws— Ay! if you only could find out their CAUSE!… Alas! that Christian ministers should dare To preach the views of Gibbon and Vol tair e ! HDT WHAT? INDEX 1838 1838 Charles Pickering had been raised in Wenham, Massachusetts and after attending Harvard College and Harvard Medical School had set up practice in Philadelphia. He had become the librarian and curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and at this point was selected to be one of the scientists (functioning primarily as a botanist, but also as a herpetologist and an ichthyologist) with the US South Seas Exploring Expedition (until 1842). Dr. Asa Gray had planned to participate in the US South Seas Exploring Expedition but delays would lead him to withdraw. WALDEN : What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring PEOPLE OF Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in WALDEN the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.– “Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.