Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Meine Freunde in Brook Farm
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love American history, Transcendentalists, utopian experiments, and boyhood memoirs full of snowstorms, pageants, music, and lively companions, and for anyone curious how ideals look in daily life.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
My Friends at Brook Farm is a memoir by John Van der Zee Sears, who as a boy in the 1840s attended the school at Brook Farm, the community near Boston founded by the Reverend George Ripley. Sears wrote it in later life, when few of his old companions remained to answer the call they once shared. He wants the people he knew there to be remembered with respect, and he gives you a warm, personal view of a place that most histories treat only as an idea.
You meet a Dutch child from Albany, a school of Spanish students and farm children, and a circle of famous names: Horace Greeley, Emerson, Hawthorne, Charles Dana and Margaret Fuller. You see how they worked, played, argued and sang, and how a plan taken from the French thinker Charles Fourier changed their lives. To begin, we go to Albany, where the story starts in a neighborhood that still spoke Dutch.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1A Dutch Boyhood in AlbanyFree
- 2How Greeley Led to Brook Farm
- 3A Bad Beginning Becomes a Good One
- 4Work, School and the Habit of Attention
- 5Play, Pageants and Conversation
- 6Fourier, the Phalanx and the End
Punkt 1 von 6
A Dutch Boyhood in Albany
Sears begins far from Massachusetts, in the Old Colony of Albany. He tells how Dutch settlers under Adrian Joris arrived in 1624 and joined the Iroquois peace alliance, and how their descendants still held to Dutch speech and customs two centuries later. His own father, Charles Sears, sold flour on the Pier by the canal basin, while his mother came from the Van Der Zee family and sang Dutch nursery rhymes to her children.
The boy spends happy days at his grandfather's farm. There two elderly Black servants, Tone and Cleo, treat him as the heir of the place. Sears tells this with candor, noting that they scorned freedom and that his antislavery father had a wife who inherited Cleo. It is one of several moments where the memoir shows the odd mixtures of the age.
The neighbors matter too. Thurlow Weed, the Whig party boss and newspaper editor, lives on the same street, and Sears defends him as a man who gave more than he took. He recalls Weed quietly paying for the family of an enemy who had slandered him. He recalls too the sting Weed felt when a paper called him a veteran lagging superfluous on the stage.
The May Conventions give the boy his first taste of reform. Every spring, groups of vegetarians, temperance speakers, abolitionists and Quakers meet in New York, each sure that its cause will bring back a Golden Age. Sears goes along and once hears Horace Greeley speak. These gatherings, along with a small private school run by Juferouw Cornelia Van Antwerp, make up the world he must leave.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
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Questions about Meine Freunde in Brook Farm
What is My Friends at Brook Farm about?
It is a memoir of a boyhood at Brook Farm, the 1840s community near Boston. John Van der Zee Sears recalls the school, the work, the entertainments, the famous visitors, and the final troubles that closed the experiment.
What was Brook Farm?
Brook Farm was a community of about two hundred acres in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, founded by the Unitarian minister George Ripley. Its members farmed, taught school and shared work and leisure. They later reorganized as a Fourierist Phalanx.
Who is Cedar in the book?
Cedar is the nickname the author earned at Brook Farm. It comes from the smell of the cedar chest his clothes were packed in, and his friends and classmates used it for him afterward.
Which famous people appear in My Friends at Brook Farm?
The author describes Horace Greeley, Thurlow Weed, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Charles Dana, Albert Brisbane, and Isaac Hecker. He met many of them as a child, through his father or at the farm.
Is My Friends at Brook Farm easy to read?
Yes, in the sense that matters: it is a friendly, anecdotal memoir told in short scenes, with jokes, school stories and sketches of people. You can open any chapter and enjoy it without background in Transcendentalism.