FREE ESSAY ON ELIZABETH PEABODY

ELIZABETH PEABODY

Teacher and educational reformer, founder of the kindergarten in America, abolitionist,
opponent of European autocratic despotism, friend of political refugees, advocate of
Native American rights and education, of woman's suffrage, and of world peace, Miss
Peabody worked unceasingly toward the improvement of society. In the 1840s, she ran a
circulating library and bookstore at 13 West Street in Boston, providing the
Transcendentalists (see previous article on Transcendentalism here) with a gathering
place and with volumes of foreign literature and philosophy. Margaret Fuller conducted
her famous conversations at 13 West Street. The Brook Farm utopian community was planned
there. Moreover, Elizabeth Peabody was a publisher at a time when few women were involved
in that business. Among the titles issued under her name were Dr. William Ellery
Channing's Emancipation (1840), Hawthorne's Grandfather's Chair, Famous Old People, and
Liberty Tree (1841), two of the four volumes of the Transcendental periodical the Dial
(1842 and 1843), and the short-lived Aesthetic Papers (1849), which included the first
appearance in print of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. Miss Peabody was also a gifted
linguist, familiar with some dozen languages, and a prolific writer on education, reform,
language, history, art, and other topics. 
Bibliography
http://www.tappedin.org/info/teachers/peabody.htm