Included are images from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo. (The Verge)
The Smithsonian has released more than 2.8 million images you can use for free
Radical Transcendentalism: Emerson, Muir and the Experience of Nature
The uniquely American Transcendentalist School which formed in Harvard-influenced 1830’s Cambridge brought a New Idea regarding man, spirit, and nature to a young country struggling to find its own voice . . . (Sierra Club)
Walt Whitman and the Soul of Democracy
Whitman looks across America and sees himself in whomever he meets: “the horseman in his saddle,/Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,/The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,/The female soothing a child–the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard,/The young fellow hoeing corn.” (The Atlantic)
A Photographer’s Guide To ‘Slow Seeing’ The Beauty In Everyday Nature
Janelle Lynch invites you to look closer, and slower. She’d want you to see each image as a world in itself — not an accidental grouping of plant matter, but a well-ordered composition created by nature and fixed in time and space by her 8-by-10-inch large-format camera.
Her implicit message is that one needs only to be still, take your time and pay close attention to find the beauty that surrounds you. But, like meditation, this seemingly simple act is often more difficult than it appears.
(NPR)
Contemplative Pedagogy Collaboration
Contemplative Pedagogy in the 21st Century University
How America Became “A City Upon a Hill”
Perry Miller, a midcentury Harvard scholar of history and literature, was a giant of academe. From 1931 to 1963, as the scholar Michael Clark has summarized, Miller “presided over most literary and historical research into the early forms of American culture.” He helped establish the study of what he called “American Civilization,” contributing to the rise of a new discipline, American Studies.
National Endowment For The Humanities
The Natural Historian . . .
The natural historian is not a fisherman who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely; but as fishing has been styled “a contemplative man’s recreation,” introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist’s observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man’s recreation.
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Walt Whitman on Grannie Flats
The Myth of Self-Reliance
I was far from immune to this essay. I underlined “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” But the more I looked back on it, the more I began to wrestle with the essay’s blind spot. I didn’t immediately see it, because the blind spot was also my own.
Jenny Odell shares some thoughts on Emerson’s Self Reliance in The Paris Review
Dean’s List 