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I feel like I learned a lot from the course and I really enjoyed some of the new learning experiences we went through. I especially liked how we went on nature walks to better understand the subjects that we were learning. I definitely understand much more about the 19th century lifestyle compared to before. The subjects that we covered over the semester were things that I might have never encountered in my life had I not taken this course.

In the beginning of the course, I had no idea what Transcendentalism was. Not because I had never heard of it before, or because there weren’t any definitions of it on Wikipedia, but because I just didn’t understand what it was actually supposed to do. “A movement against the current state of culture and society” sounded extremely general and vague to me. However, as we learned more about it, I actually found it to be interesting. Even though only a small group of people were involved in the movement, it made a significant impact, which is very impressive. Also, the fact that each individual contribution to the movement was documented and mattered makes Transcendentalism that much more interesting. I also like the effect in had on a family level. For example, Amos Alcott’s involvement in Transcendentalism affected his daughter Louisa’s life and perhaps even shaped her into the writer and character that she was.

One of my favorite books that we read this semester was Little Women. Prior to the course, I had read it before and watched theater versions of it, but re-reading it after learning about the 19th century made it much more fun. Learning about what experiences shaped the author and how the larger social values affected an individual’s life made reading the book more interesting. I knew that the book was based on Alcott’s life, but I didn’t realize how closely it reflected her life. I read in the introduction of the book that most of the incidents depicted in Little Women were actual experiences that Alcott and her sisters went through. It made the story much more real.