He Has "Travelled Much in Concord"

Abstract

When Robert Gross’s The Transcendentalists and Their World arrived in my mailbox, I recalled a haunting passage in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Late in the novel, Captain Ahab reminisces to first mate Starbuck how long it has been since he struck his first whale, when he was eighteen. “Forty—forty— forty years ago! Forty years of continual whaling! Forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time!” “For forty years,” he continued, “has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep!” But to what end? “How the better or richer is Ahab, now?”1 Those who have followed Robert Gross’s career will understand why this searing passage came to mind, for scholars now have in hand the book that they have anticipated for over forty years, ever since Gross decided to continue his deep excavation of the town of Concord, Massachusetts that he began in his Bancroft Prize-winning The Minute Men and Their World (1976). Coming when it did, his elegant history followed a handful of seminal demographic investigations of communities or discrete regions by such then-budding historians as Michael Zuckerman, Philip Greven, and Kenneth A. Lockridge.2 Armed with bulky first-generation computers, they and other demographers meticulously combed local archives for town and church records, tax lists, genealogical data, probate records, and other materials that they regarded not as historical detritus but as significant, virtually unstudied repositories for the study of family and community in the colonies. Another reason that this book has been so long in coming is because over these decades, Gross has also been engaged in other scholarship, perhaps most significantly as a member of the editorial board of, and as an editor of and contributor to, one of the volumes in the American Antiquarian Society’s five-volume History of the Book in America.3 He also is a frequent participant in various symposia whose proceedings often eventuate in publication: vide his essay on Shays’s Rebellion in the volume he edited, In Debt to Shays (1993); and another, in Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and its Context (1999), his contribution to a conference at the Massachusetts Historical