#  Robert Gross 

Transcendentalism as a Living Tradition Workshop participant, September 2026

 

 

 



   ![Robert Gross](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2025-09/Bob%2C%20Federalist%20Society%201%20%282%29%20%281%29.jpg?itok=VPLQJL-K) 

 



 





 

Robert A. Gross is James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His first book, *The Minutemen and Their World* (1976), presents a community study of the coming of the American Revolution in Concord, Massachusetts, site of “the shot heard ‘round the world.” Recipient of the 1977 Bancroft Prize, *Minutemen* was reissued in a revised and expanded edition (2022) by Picador Books.

Professor Gross’s latest book is *The Transcendentalists and Their* World, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A cultural study of major American writers and a deep social biography of a place and an idea, the book traces the impact of capitalism, democracy, and social reform on nineteenth-century Concord, and it explores, in turn, the influence of these changes on the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau.

[About the Expanding Circles Workshop](/transcendentalism-workshop "Transcendentalism as a Living Tradition Workshop")