THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS AND THEIR WORLDBy Robert A. Gross

The “great man” theory of history has been deeply out of fashion for some time, but Robert A. Gross’s “The Transcendentalists and Their World” might inspire one to defend it, at least on readerly grounds. In the 1970s, Gross was a young member of the “new social history” movement, studying and recapturing the past through the lives of everyday people, most of whom had been previously neglected in our popular narratives. This requires combing through personal and municipal documents — diaries, letters, tax records — to recreate times and places on a more granular level. The pioneering idea, now a common practice, was to replace (or at least balance) the great man theory with the “thousand little men and women” theory.