Review by Booklist Review
The best-remembered Transcendentalists of early-nineteenth-century America are essayists and poets Emerson and Thoreau. But there were scores of others who also wrote, especially pamphlets and sermons and the forerunners of the op-ed. They also founded churches, faith-based and issue-advocacy organizations, activist networks, magazines, schools, and charities and launched what became environmentalism as well as liberal Christianity. Buehrens makes the life and work of James Freeman Clarke (1810-88) the sustaining spine of this sweeping survey. Anchored in the Church of the Disciples, which he founded in Boston in 1841, Clarke often seems to have been everywhere, cheering and comforting his fellow Unitarian activists as they promoted the abolition of slavery, women's rights, freedmen's rights, democratically governed churches, and social justice. In vividly sketching Clarke's colleagues, such as protofeminist Margaret Fuller, Battle Hymn of the Republic author Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist minister and soldier (and ""discoverer"" of Emily Dickinson) Thomas Higginson, and several others, Buehrens leaves little doubt that the Transcendentalists are the progenitors of the modern social liberalism whose sweep continues and butts up against political conservatism. He will also leave readers thirsty for full books on the women and men whose careers he highlights. Collective biography at its best.--Ray Olson Copyright 2020 Booklist
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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Unitarian Universalist minister Buehrens (Universalists and Unitarians in America) presents an illuminating collective biography of 35 key figures from the 19th-century American transcendentalist movement. Buehrens argues that, while transcendentalism is often encountered by Americans through the lens of literature, the lives of transcendentalists demonstrate that their beliefs led them to passionate activism intended to reform--even revolutionize--politics and society. Whether through projects such as the Brook Farm experiment in communal living, urban social ministries such as a refuge for women fleeing domestic abuse, or organized resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, transcendentalists labored to address the social problems of their day. However, Buehrens's claim that transcendentalists "sparked" or gave "rise to nothing less than the start of a second American revolution" overreaches. Many of the causes transcendentalists took up (such as abolition) predate the rise of transcendentalism in 1830s New England. Also, the persistent focus on white male leadership (when figures such as Lewis Hayden and Margaret Fuller appear in the text, their contributions are often framed as successful primarily due to the encouragement and promotion of white men) adds a note of disappointment to an otherwise engaging narrative. Despite this, Buehrens's take on Transcendental activism will appeal to scholars interested in exploring antebellum social justice concerns. (Dec.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Buehrens looks at American Transcendentalism through the lives and perspectives of intellectuals, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and others who were in the vanguard of several 19th-century social reform movements. He studies the lives and deeds of the Bostonians associated with the movement and demonstrates their ongoing influence and involvement in abolitionism, gender equality, and more democratically-run churches, including the free church movement. The author also connects them to Unitarianism, Universalism, and the Disciples of Christ. Coming into their own in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Transcendentalists garnered strength in their friendships, even if they didn't agree on tactics or the nature of their religious beliefs. Unitarian Universalist minister Buehrens (past president, Christian Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations; Understanding the Bible) studies the movement through a lens on the lives of its leaders, allowing for nuances that might otherwise be lost. VERDICT A well-written introduction to the Transcendentalists and a complement to Philip Gura's more idea-driven American Transcendentalism.--Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, NJ
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A detailed account of how the New England transcendentalists and their church allies promoted and supported the battles of abolitionism and women's rights.Buehrens (Universalists and Unitarians in America: A People's History, 2011, etc.), the former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and author, returns with an inspiring history of men and women devoted to various forms of liberation. Some of the author's principals are well knownEmerson, Thoreau, Julia Ward Howe, and other notables of the era and movementbut numerous others step out from history's shadows and reveal themselves to be quite deserving of the attention Buehrens awards them. Charles Follen, Frederic Henry Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, Caroline Wells Healy Dall, Lydia Maria Francis Childthese and numerous others played key roles in abolitionism and/or women's rights, and the author gives them their due. Some other celebrated names appear, as well: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Darwin (many transcendentalists embraced On the Origin of Species), Frederick Douglass, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson, and, especially, John Brown. Buehrens follows him from Ohio to Kansas to Boston (two visits there, including one to the bedside of Charles Sumner, who was recovering from his assault in the Senate by Preston Brooks) to Harpers Ferry and to his death. The transcendentalists, though troubled by Brown's violence, supported his goals, and both Emerson and Thoreau paid tribute to him after his death. "Brown was no religious liberal," writes the author, "but rather a staunch Calvinist, with the feel of an Old Testament patriarch and the fervor of a prophet." The tone of the text is somewhat academic, occasionally dry, but the stories themselves, as Buehrens points out, tell us as much about ourselves as about those long gone. These people remain, he writes, "quite near," and we can take inspiration from "their prophetic insight, courage, and example."A clear, sometimes-vibrant picture of the varieties of heroism that appear in battles for human rights. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
