"Excursions presents texts of nine essays, including some of Thoreau's most engaging and popular works, newly edited and based on the most authoritative versions of each. These essays represent Thoreau in many stages of his writing career, ranging from 1842-when he accepted Emerson's commission to review four volumes of botanical and zoological catalogues in an essay that was published in The Dial is "Natural, History of Massachusetts" to 1862, when...

The experiment at Brook Farm attracted such visitors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Charles A. Dana. In characterizations punctuated with humor, author Lindsay Swift's portrait of "this most romantic incident of New England Transcendentalism" examines the farm's members and customs, and how the farm affected the life of everyone who visited.

I saw the whale ahead of us, coming with twice his ordinary speed, and with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him and his course toward us was marked by a white foam which he made with continual violent thrashing of his tail, his head was about half out of water and in that way he came upon and again struck the ship." An angry whale rams and destroys a whale ship in 1820. The helpless crew stranded 1500...

"The vast majority of Americans have, at one point or another, gotten drunk, smoked, dabbled with drugs, gambled, sworn, or engaged in adultery. During the 1800s, "respectable" people struggled to control these behaviors, labeling them "bad" and the people who indulged in them unrespectable. In the twentieth century, these minor vices were transformed into a societal complex of enormous and pervasive influence. Yet the general belief persists that...