Public Research Talk: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Radical Reconstruction, and the Antislavery Roots of American Social Science - Peter Wirzbicki
Common Room, CSWR
42 Francis Ave., Cambridge, MA
Mon., Sep. 21, 2026, 12 – 1:30 p.m. 
Registration required.
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Franklin Sanborn lived two lives. He is best known as a Transcendentalist firebrand: a friend of Emerson and Thoreau, a member of John Brown’s famed “Secret Six,” and one of the first chroniclers of the Transcendentalist movement. Through his work, he helped preserve the spirit of Transcendentalism in the late nineteenth century. Yet he may have been even more influential as a leader of the American Social Science Association, the nation’s first social science organization, which played a major role in the professionalization of history, economics, and sociology.
These two worlds appear radically different: one defined by the exuberant romanticism and political idealism of the antebellum era, the other by the restrained scientific study of society. This talk asks whether these two sides of Sanborn can be reconciled. In doing so, it considers how the spirit of Transcendentalism may have evolved and survived in the seemingly inhospitable realm of post–Civil War social science.
Peter Wirzbicki is Associate Professor of American History at Princeton University. His first book, Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery, examines the intellectual and personal relationships between radical abolitionism and New England Transcendentalism.
His current research explores the intellectual history of Reconstruction, with a focus on how Americans understood democracy, rights, sovereignty, and suffrage in the years following the Civil War.
Programming Series: Transcendentalism
Gazette Classification: Humanities, Lecture, Religion
Sponsor: Center for the Study of World Religions
Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, CSWR Events Coordinator, [email protected]
More info: cswr.hds.harvard.edu…