Thoreau Biographer Laura Dassow Walls to Give Virtual Lecture

H-EnviroHealth Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls to give virtual lecture

Discussion published by James Lewis on Thursday, March 18, 2021 Type: Lecture Date: March 31, 2021 Subject Fields: African American History / Studies, American History / Studies, Environmental History / Studies, Human Rights, Literature Laura Dassow Walls, the award-winning biographer of Henry David Thoreau, will deliver a virtual talk “‘A Vast and Indefinite Loss’: Thoreau’s Reflections on Nature and Slavery” as part of the Forest History Society’s virtual lecture series Unprecedented Seasons. Walls will explore the intimate connections between nature and slavery through the life and writings of Thoreau. This presentation is part of the Forest History Society’s Unprecedented Seasons virtual lecture series. The talk will be at 2 PM EST on March 31, 2021, and will be streamed live on Zoom. The event is free but registration is required. In 1854, when federal marshals arrested a free Black citizen of Boston and deported him in chains back to the South and into slavery, Henry David Thoreau’s faith in both nature and nation nearly collapsed. At the very momentWalden was being printed in Boston, Thoreau stood on a nearby lecture platform and told an audience of thousands that he could no longer bear to walk to Walden Pond. For weeks he felt haunted by “a vast and indefinite loss,” until he realized, as he said, that what he had lost “was a country.” He was now the advocate of nature who woke up to discover that he dwelled no longer somewhere between heaven and hell but “wholly within hell.” Yet he concluded “Slavery in Massachusetts” on a note of hope, one found in a metaphorical fragrant flower plucked from “the slime and muck of earth.” Overnight, America’s founding nature writer became one of its most famous abolitionists. He has remained one of the influential writers on the environment and human rights ever since. What does it tell us that the paradigmatic book about recovering freedom through solitude in nature was published to a broken nation which had just dedicated itself, as Thoreau charged, to “slavery and servility”? What can Thoreau's torment and work tell us about dwelling in an America, and on a planet, on the brink?—and about imagining, nevertheless, a way to walk toward freedom? Join Laura Walls to find out.

Citation: James Lewis. Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls to give virtual lecture. H-EnviroHealth. 03-18-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/114427/discussions/7443900/thoreau-biographer-laura-dassow-walls-give-virtual-lecture Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-EnviroHealth

Laura Dassow Walls teaches nineteenth-century American literature and the history of ecological thought at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of numerous essays on Thoreau, Emerson, Humboldt, and related figures. Her book Henry David Thoreau: A Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017) received the Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography.

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James Lewis

Contact Email: [email protected] URL: https://foresthistory.org/thoreau-nature-and-slavery/