Some places seem to be hubs of action. One of those unique and dynamic places is Concord, Massachusetts -- the earliest European in-land settlement in the United States, the epicenter for the American Revolution, the location of Walden Pond, and the birthplace of American transcendentalism. Why is Concord such a hot spot for historically significant events? In a forthcoming special issue of The Atlantic commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, two UConn scholars penned an essay that emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship between STEM and the humanities to tackle this and other pressing questions. Their article is available online now, and the print edition is expected in November.
Emeritus Draper Professor of American History Robert Gross and professor in the Department of Earth Sciences Robert Thorson began collaborating in the early 2000s, when they worked together as part of a team to reimagine UConn’s Honors Program and develop its core courses. More than two decades later, Gross and Thorson worked together on the essay arguing how the physical landscape of Concord shaped the Revolution and the country’s history. They met with UConn Today to discuss their collaboration and highlights from “Why Concord?”
Can you talk about how your collaboration came about and how it has shaped your research trajectories?
Thorson: In the early 2000s, the UConn Honors Program was rethinking its mission and administration. I was heavily involved at the time, having been nominated by the CLAS dean to be the program director. Following a national search, they hired Lynne Goodstein to serve as director and Robert Gross arrived at the same year from William and Mary to occupy an endowed chair in history, James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History. Things congealed and Lynne, Bob, and I began working together to create an Honors Core Curriculum.
We collaborated and won a provost competition for the New Honors Core for a course with the theme “Nature and the Environment.” We invited the artist Janet Pritchard to join our team and to help develop our flagship course called “Walden and the American Landscape” that was taught for 15 years.
In my case, this collaboration resulted in four books from 2009-2018: “Beyond Walden,” “Walden's Shore,” “The Boatman,” “The Guide to Walden Pond,” and many articles.
Over the last few years, we planned to write an essay answering the question, “Why Concord?” The epiphany for the piece came when we stood on the bank of the Concord River, in the Great Meadow Wildlife Refuge, during a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Thoreau Society. At that moment, we both saw our way to writing the essay. When writing it, Bob, an award-winning social historian, concluded that all previous answers were wanting. My job was to reach back deeper in time to find an explanation rooted in environmental determinism.
Gross: I began my career teaching at Amherst College, a small liberal arts college, which had a big premium on collaboration among faculty in team-taught courses across the curriculum. I came to UConn, which has been incredibly encouraging of this kind of interdisciplinary teaching. Our collaborations as faculty were immediately something to benefit students in the classroom. Meanwhile, I kept working on my long-term book project, which was published in 2021 as “The Transcendentalists and Their World.”
I have been mostly a historian of things above ground and since getting to know Thor, I've been going underground. Rocks were not part of my normal historical sources. Thanks to our conversations, I’m now more likely to think about the landscape and the physical nature in which human actors are set. When telling the story about the past I make sure to include nature, which is a real change from how people live and write history.
Can you talk about the sense of place, environmental determinism, and some of the themes you explore in “Why Concord?”
Gross: I think the key thing to think about from the essay is how the geological changes of the past 16,000 years shaped the environment in particular ways and that human actions take place within that framework.
Consider the ridge that forms the entryway into the town of Concord and now frames the highway. The notch through that ridge is narrow, confined, stony, and requires sharp turns. This place, called Bloody Bluff, is a geological fault zone. When the British came in, the army sought to seize and hold the two bridges over the Concord and Sudbury rivers. In effect, military tactics and maneuvers that were then, and are always, tied to the landscape.
Thorson: Sense of place is important but often goes unexplored. If physical geography is the house in which regional culture makes its home, then geology is the foundation, plumbing, wiring, and internet service to that house.
Some examples of how geology played a role in shaping Concord include the unusually fertile river meadows for hay, loamy soils for cultivation, and moist pastures for grazing that helped make Concord America's oldest inland town, established in 1635. The first armed resistance to British aggression came from the old North Bridge in Concord, a location narrowed by bedrock. The challenging layout of the Battle Road back to Boston, with its flanking stone walls, rock ledges, and corners helped the patriot cause. During the 1830s-1850s, Concord was also the site for intellectual revolution, as the home to leading free thinkers centered on greater Boston, including R.W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. This came from the special layout of the town during a time of major change, notably its remnant gallery forests and the outback of Walden Woods.
What are you hoping readers will come away with?
Thorson: I have a mantra I use for every course. Students chant it near the end of the semester when they are comfortable enough, "No rocks, no ecosystems, no cultures." This is both shorthand for the direction of Earth history (abiotic to biotic to sociobiology) and for the machinery of Earth systems, in which the minerals dissolved in water give rise to ecosystems that human beings are part of. My favorite example is the mineral apatite, which releases the element phosphorus that gives all life the energy it needs, and, in the human case, to create all cultures.
Gross: The history of the natural world always frames the setting in which human beings make choices to carry out their own individual and collective purposes, and we often take them for granted and forget how much we are adapting to that natural world. Or put it another way, our failures to take that into account are clearly part of our failures to deal with climate change, but we have to always remember that natural life cycles will take their course even when we are long gone. The question will be, who will be around at the 500th anniversary of the revolution?
If nothing else, I think what we've written is also an iconoclastic account of the coming of the Revolution. The shot heard around the world consisted of muskets firing balls. The current shot heard around the world is a cataclysm heard around the world, if we don't learn to deal with nature and address climate change.
