This dissertation examines how Concord, Massachusetts became a heritage town in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Concord-based authors (including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott) at once contributed to Concord’s attractiveness as a location and took advantage of the growing reputation and popularity of the town as a tourist site. Their writings, rooted in Concord, drew attention to the town and to themselves as authors within it, while also elevating the stature of American literature. Linking literature and site-building, Concordians encouraged contemporaneous sightseeing in a curated landscape. This sets the origins of tourism and site-building in Concord earlier than standard academic narratives of Progressive Era preservation in New England. The primary contribution of this interdisciplinary study is to trace the ways in which collective memory was fashioned for an audience of literary “arm-chair travellers” and then employed to endow private houses with literary and historical importance to national heritage, as public locations to be visited and preserved in Concord’s landscape. This work traces the development of spiritualized “places” in Concord from Revolutionary War monument-building to Emerson’s literary community investing the landscape with poetic associations, Hawthorne’s engagement of tourism as an appeal to readers, and George William Curtis’s efforts to market Concord as a national literary retreat. It further examines Thoreau’s literary career in relation to his interest in local history, tourism, and museum-building in his hometown. Finally, the popularity of Alcott’s Little Women boosted tourism in Concord, and the increase of visitors coincided with projects to memorialize Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Transcendentalist movement in the landscape. These efforts culminated in the development of guide books and organized tours for visitors, and the emergence of a local souvenir industry. The study concludes with the institutionalization of historic house museums in the early twentieth century.

This essay is an examination of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the development of American art through his essays, specifically his writings on nature and self-reliance. Through emphasizing individual potential, Emerson also influenced the visual arts. Instead of following the required formula in Europe of attending certain ateliers and seeking prestigious patronage, American artists, namely the Luminists and the Ashcan School, sought to address the issues of their day and portray life as it existed around them. Each of these groups formed during periods of time when American society was shifting and the American identity was evolving. Through addressing the issues at hand, artists formed an American aesthetic separate from the traditional methodologies in Europe, in turn, contributing to a national identity. After the Civil War, the United States underwent considerable change as different areas of the nation redefined themselves in conjunction to new laws and shifts in social structure. For the Luminists, the writings of Emerson concerning nature were especially applicable during this time since most people in the United States lived in rural circumstances and still struggled to define a national art separate from European tradition. Emerson focused on nature's ability to uplift and inspire mankind, bringing them closer to the Divine and America's unique and untamed nature was one aspect that separated it from Europe. The Luminists focused on their surrounding natural environment, portraying the connection between man and nature. During the Progressive Age, Robert Henri followed Emerson's instruction to illustrate life as it existed for him in the early twentieth century. By this time, most people had moved to the cities in search of employment and everyone was crammed into small tenements. Henri taught his art students to value and illustrate life in all of its gritty reality. In this way, he followed Emerson to communicate beauty through an honest interpretation of life. Although diverse in their techniques, the Luminists and Robert Henri both utilized the ideas of Emerson to help define an American aesthetic.

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A study of the influence of Negro slavery on Emerson's concept of freedom.

The purpose of this thesis is to relate the six personalities dealt with by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Representative Men to such proportions of the essayist's ideas as may be applied to these six representative types, to the end of arriving at an understanding of Emerson's aim in writing about these six men and about great men in general.

The aim of this MA thesis was to analyze the correspondences and differences between the individual philosophers and writers from the loosely formed intellectual group of Euro- American pragmatism. The thesis utilizes a chronological approach, starting with the early signs of transatlantic pragmatism in Immanuel Kant's philosophy, and traces this development throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century. In addition to the comparison of philosophical similarities and dissimilarities of the examined authors, each chapter also considered the possible uses of pragmatic techniques in pedagogy and education. Therefore, besides the examination of differing epistemologies of writers of transatlantic pragmatism, this thesis also aims to offer educational suggestions, ideas and practical methods for an educator. The first chapter of the thesis is designed to introduce the theme of the work at large. The second chapter of the thesis analyzes the rudimentary signs of pragmatism, in the revolutionary ideas of Immanuel Kant and Johan Gottlieb Fichte. This chapter focuses on the genesis of subjective idealism, subjective category creation and Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, along with his lectures on vocations. The third chapter surveys the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his approaches towards the...

The topic of this paper is the determinization problem of ω-automata under the transition-based Emerson-Lei acceptance (called TELA), which generalizes all standard acceptance conditions and is defined using positive Boolean formulas. Such automata can be determinized by first constructing an equivalent generalized Büchi automaton (GBA), which is later determinized. The problem of constructing an equivalent GBA is considered in detail, and three new approaches of solving it are proposed. Furthermore, a new determinization construction is introduced which determinizes several GBA separately and combines them using a product construction. An experimental evaluation shows that the product approach is competitive when compared with state-of-the-art determinization procedures. The second part of the paper studies limit-determinization of TELA and we show that this can be done with a single-exponential blow-up, in contrast to the known double-exponential lower-bound for determinization. Finally, one version of the limit-determinization procedure yields good-for-MDP automata which can be used for quantitative probabilistic model checking.

En étudiant le cas du photographe Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) à partir du discours tenu par les historiens de la photographie sur son principal traité (Naturalistic Photography) et sur son oeuvre, cette thèse vise non seulement à montrer la pertinence d'une approche sociale de 1'histoire de la photographie, mais à faire état de 1'importance des travaux du sociologue Pierre Bourdieu pour les fondements théoriques d'un tel type d'approche. En effet, des théories comme la division du domaine artistique à partir du dix-neuvième siècle en deux secteurs d'activités (champ de production restreinte et champ de grande production), la surdétermination des oeuvres d'art ainsi que 1'inégalité des compétences artistiques entre les couches sociales remettent en cause les rapports généralement posés entre la photographie à des fins artistiques et la société et entraînent une redéfinition de l'objet de 1'histoire sociale de la photographie. Redéfinition non sans conséquences sur 1'analyse des oeuvres et des écrits des photographes. En procédant dans 1'optique des travaux de Bourdieu, 1'analyse sociale des oeuvres photographiques de P.H. Emerson ne consiste plus à déterminer en quoi le contenu et la forme de ces oeuvres trahissent la vision d'un groupe en particulier. Elle vise, au contraire, à mettre en évidence comment ce n'est pas à 1'intérieur des oeuvres mais à 1'extérieur d'elles que l'impact du social se fait sentir, dans leurs liens avec l'univers de la production et 1'univers de la consommation, c'est-à-dire avec les autres types de production photographique et les conceptions esthétiques en présence parmi le public. En ce qui a trait à 1'analyse des écrits, 1'application des idées du sociologue français est non moins novatrice. Plus qu'une analyse de contenu cherchant à cerner 1'intentionnalité d'Emerson, et de là son idéologie, l'étude du traité Naturalistic Photography tend à établir comment les propos du photographe traduisent sa situation dans le milieu de la photographie. Autrement dit, 1'analyse de Naturalistic Photography est 1'occasion d'établir les principaux paramètres en vertu desquels s'élabore la pratique du photographe. Ainsi, c'est à une toute autre conception de 1'histoire sociale de la photographie que nous convient les travaux de Pierre Bour— dieu. Une toute autre conception qui permet, croyons-nous, à 1'historien d'assumer pleinement le rôle "critique" qui doit être le sien dans la société: mieux comprendre le passé afin d'aider à mieux agir sur le présent. / Montréal Trigonix inc. 2018