As part of our series on "A Different Kind of Leadership", we were delighted to welcome Robert A. Gross, Ph.D, Columbia, Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at University of Connecticut.

​

Professor Gross specializes in the social and cultural history of the U.S., from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. His recent work examines New England writers — notably, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson — in historical context. From that project has come his latest book "The Transcendentalists and Their World".

​

"The Transcendentalists and Their World" offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers.

 

In this dialogue we explored what we should learn from the transcendentalists about High Performance Leadership.