{"id":236197,"date":"2025-10-09T07:15:23","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T11:15:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=236197"},"modified":"2025-10-08T11:42:47","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T15:42:47","slug":"place-matters-history-is-the-result","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/10\/place-matters-history-is-the-result\/","title":{"rendered":"Place Matters. History Is the Result"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

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?\u00a0\u00a0In a forthcoming special issue of The Atlantic\u00a0<\/i>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<\/a>,\u00a0and the print edition is\u00a0expected in November.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

\"A
A fieldstone wall at Walden Pond. (Photo courtesy of Robert Thorson)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

Emeritus\u00a0Draper\u00a0Professor of American History\u00a0Robert Gross<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0professor in the Department of Earth Sciences\u00a0Robert Thorson<\/a>\u00a0began\u00a0collaborating\u00a0in the early 2000s, when they worked together as part of a team to reimagine UConn’s Honors Program and\u00a0develop\u00a0its\u00a0core courses.\u00a0More than\u00a0two decades later, Gross and Thorson\u00a0worked\u00a0together\u00a0on\u00a0the essay\u00a0arguing how\u00a0the\u00a0physical\u00a0landscape of Concord shaped the Revolution\u00a0and the country’s history.\u00a0They met with UConn Today to discuss their collaboration and\u00a0highlights from “Why Concord?”\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Can you talk about how your collaboration came about and how it has shaped your research trajectories?<\/h2>\r\n

Thorson:<\/b>\u00a0In the early 2000s, the\u00a0UConn\u00a0Honors Program was\u00a0rethinking\u00a0its mission and administration. I was heavily involved at the time, having been\u00a0nominated by the CLAS dean to be the program director.\u00a0Following a national search, they\u00a0hired\u00a0Lynne Goodstein\u00a0to serve as director\u00a0and\u00a0Robert 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,\u00a0and I began working together to create an Honors Core Curriculum.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

We collaborated and won a provost competition for the New Honors Core\u00a0for\u00a0a\u00a0course with the theme\u00a0“Nature and the\u00a0Environment.”\u00a0We invited\u00a0the\u00a0artist Janet Pritchard\u00a0to join our team and to help develop our flagship course called “Walden and the American Landscape” that was taught for 15 years.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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\u00a0<\/i>were\u00a0wanting.\u00a0My\u00a0job was to reach back\u00a0deeper in\u00a0time to\u00a0find an\u00a0explanation\u00a0rooted in\u00a0environmental determinism.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Gross:<\/b> 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.”<\/p>\r\n

\u00a0I have been mostly a historian of things above ground and\u00a0since\u00a0getting to know Thor,\u00a0I’ve\u00a0been going underground.\u00a0Rocks were\u00a0not part of my normal historical sources.\u00a0Thanks to our conversations,\u00a0I’m\u00a0now more likely to think about the landscape and the physical nature in which human actors are set.\u00a0When telling the story about the past\u00a0I make\u00a0sure to\u00a0include nature,\u00a0which is\u00a0a real change from how people live and write history.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Can you talk about the sense of place, environmental determinism, and some of the themes you explore in “Why Concord?”\u202f<\/h2>\r\n

Gross:<\/b>\u00a0I think the key thing to think about\u00a0from\u00a0the essay is how the geological\u00a0changes of\u00a0the past\u00a016,000\u00a0years\u00a0shaped\u00a0the environment\u00a0in particular\u00a0ways\u00a0and that\u00a0human actions take place within that framework.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Consider the\u00a0ridge that\u00a0forms the entryway into the town\u00a0of Concord\u00a0and\u00a0now\u00a0frames the highway.\u00a0The notch through that ridge is narrow, confined, stony, and requires sharp turns. This place, called Bloody Bluff, is a geological fault zone.\u00a0When the British came in, the army sought\u00a0to seize and hold the two bridges over the Concord and Sudbury rivers. In\u00a0effect, military tactics and maneuvers\u00a0that\u00a0were\u00a0then,\u00a0and are always,\u00a0tied to the landscape.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

\u00a0Thorson:\u00a0<\/b>Sense of\u00a0place is important but often goes unexplored.\u00a0If physical geography is the house in which regional culture makes its home, then geology is the foundation,\u00a0plumbing, wiring, and internet service to\u00a0that house.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0This 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.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

What are you hoping readers will come away with?\u202f<\/h2>\r\n

Thorson:<\/b>\u00a0I have a mantra I use for every course. Students chant it near the end of the semester when they are comfortable enough,\u00a0“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\u00a0Earth systems, in which the minerals dissolved in water give rise to ecosystems that human beings are part of. My favorite\u00a0example is\u00a0the mineral\u00a0apatite, which releases the element phosphorus that gives\u00a0all\u00a0life the energy\u00a0it needs, and, in the human case,\u00a0to create all cultures.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Gross:\u00a0<\/b>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\u00a0take them\u00a0for granted and forget how much we\u00a0are 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\u00a0have to\u00a0always remember that natural life cycles will take their course even\u00a0when we\u00a0are long gone.\u00a0The\u00a0<\/b>question will be, who will be around at the 500th anniversary of the revolution?\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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. \u00a0<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History and ‘deep history’ answer the question: Why Concord?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":236206,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2460,2235,2227],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2093],"class_list":["post-236197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-faculty","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-edu-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 11:55:09","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236197"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236424,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236197\/revisions\/236424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/236206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236197"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=236197"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=236197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}