Notes of Conversations, 1848-1875

Notes of Conversations, 1848-1875 is a volume of transcripts of conversations conducted by the nineteenth-century American philosopher and educator A. Bronson Alcott at various locations in New England and the Midwest. The transcripts have been copied from unpublished manuscripts in the Alcott collection at Harvard University and Concord Free Library, as well as published contemporary articles in The Radical, New York Tribune, and Chicago Tribune. Gathered in this volume, Alcotts transcripts vividly reflect American intellectual concerns from the years preceding the Civil War through the beginning of the Gilded Age. In this set of remarkable documents, Alcott holds conversations on broad aspects of human culture, on literature, on philosophical idealism, on women’s roles and accomplishments, on abolition a whole range of social, literary, and religious reforms. Because women made up a significant portion of Alcotts enthusiastic participants, the transcripts allow us to witness their commitment to self-culture through a popular social phenomenon at a time when most middle- and upper-class women were not able to pursue college educations. The transcripts make us privy to the oral performances of some of the most important reformers of the nineteenth century, men and women such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Peabody, and Caroline Healey Dall. Further, lists of attendees at these public conversations show that this talking phenomenal extended beyond the well-known writers, thinkers, and reformers of the age to hundreds of men and women in nineteenth-century New England and Midwestern societies.