Thoreau and the American Idyll (In Our Time)
1854 · Resource
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 19th century American writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. Anti-slavery activist and passionate environmentalist, Thoreau was above all a champion of self-reliance and individualism. He was also a champion of the simple life, a lover of nature and an enemy of the modern who lived alone in a log cabin in the woods a
On these timelines: In Our Time (BBC podcast), Resources: Combined
Around 1854
- Great Famine of Ireland (1845)
- On the Origin of Species (1859)
- American Civil War (1861)
- Pasteur develops germ theory of disease (1861)
- Commodore Perry opens Japan (1853)
- Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1861)
- Communist Manifesto (1848)
- British Raj (1858)
- Wars of German Unification (1864)
- First public demonstration of surgical anaesthesia (1846)