• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Journals
    • Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Journals
    • Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    A Distaste for War at Walden Pond: Thoreau's The Bean-Field, Theories of Personal Property, and the Mexican-American War

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    11_23YaleJL_Human389_2011_.pdf
    Size:
    2.129Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Cross, Jesse
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/7467
    Abstract
    Upon the tenth anniversary of their graduation from Harvard University, the members of the Harvard class of 1837 were sent a survey asking them to state, among other things, their current occupation. One member of this class, Henry David Thoreau, undoubtedly encountered this request while in a peculiar frame of mind. Thoreau responded to the survey on September 30, 1847, less than four weeks after he had left the small home he had occupied for two years at Walden Pond. Once again a "sojourner in civilized life," as he would put it in Walden, Thoreau responded to his alma mater by listing no less than thirteen different occupations. "I am a Schoolmaster," Thoreau explained, "a Private Tutor, a Surveyor - a Gardener, a Farmer - a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster." Of these many alleged professions, the one that would actually provide much of Thoreau's income over the years - his work as a surveyor - is also one of the least considered or analyzed aspects of Thoreau's identity. As Patrick Chura observed in his recent book, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, "Thoreau's literary stock has risen steadily in the twentieth century, but interest from literary researchers [in Thoreau's work as a surveyor] has been intermittent at best." This neglect of Thoreau-as-surveyor is unfortunate for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it has left incomplete the task of studying the interesting and complex relationship Thoreau bore to the property regimes and property theories of his day. Scholars frequently have been content to focus upon Thoreau's famous critiques of contemporary property regimes in the opening chapter of Walden, where Thoreau describes ownership as part of a larger economic system that had engulfed New England and that he found detestable. As Thoreau's long career as a surveyor reveals, however, the relationship must be more complex than this. His work as a surveyor made him into an agent of the existing property regime, yet the man we see in much of Thoreau's writing is aloof and triumphant, a far cry from someone who understands himself to be an agent of a regime he detests. How can this be?
    Collections
    Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2025)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.