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Seven decades ago, Jackie Robinson stepped onto Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field and changed not only the face of professional baseball in America: in ways...
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It’s Grilled Cheese Month. We’re Bookish. So here are books about grilled cheese. You’re welcome.
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Look at that smile filled with charm and smarm. Oh, Ernest. We knew you were trouble when you walked in.
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Frances Benjamin Johnston with group of children looking at her camera between 1890 and 1910.
Happy birthday, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was born 210 years ago today! Emerson, who began his career as a Unitarian minister, went on to become the preeminent lecturer, essayist, and philosopher of 19th century America. The founder of the Transcendentalist movement, he is the author of classic essays including “Self-Reliance,” “Nature,” and “The American Scholar.”
Click to find out more about his spiritual and political writing.
Happy National Poetry Month! Here’s Mary Oliver reading “The Summer Day” to get things started!
Happy 195th birthday to Henry David Thoreau! Thoreau was an American philosopher, naturalist, and a leading transcedentalist. His essays on the relationship between people and nature are credited with inspiring the conservation movement. His masterpiece, Walden chronicles his two years living in the woods and is considered a nature classic. Learn more about Thoreau’s legacy at The Walden Woods Project.
On April 27, 1882, the influential essayist, lecturer, and social reformer Ralph Waldo Emerson passed away. Nicknamed “the Concord Sage,” Emerson was a founding member of the Transcendentalism Movement and championed the free individual in a turbulent society. His masterful essay Nature and other essential writings are collected in The Spiritual Emerson.As a public intellectual in the mid-19th century, Emerson wrote numerous political essays and his best were collected in The Political Emerson.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver reads “The Summer Day” from New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1. (Beacon Press, 1992). Audio from the CD At Blackwater Pond.
