Notes of Conversations, 1848-1875

Book excerpt: 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 The transcripts have been created from unpublished manuscripts in the Alcott collection at Harvard University and Concord Free Library, as well as published contemporary articles in The Radical, New York Daily Tribune, and The Chicago Tribune. Gathered in this volume, Alcott's transcripts vividly reflect American intellectual concerns from the years preceding the Civil War through the beginning of the Gilded Age.