OCH Publications > Oregon Humanities table of contents
Oregon Humanities is a journal of ideas and perspectives published twice a year by the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Each issue includes essays and articles that explore a particular theme from a variety of perspectives, broadening the ways in which readers think about a subject and providing a basis for further thoughtful discussion.
Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007
- Kathleen Holt
- EDITOR
- Jennifer Viviano
- GRAPHIC DESIGN
- Leigh van der Werff
- PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
- Allison Dubinsky
- COPY EDITOR
- Editorial Advisory Board
- Tom Booth
- Brian Doyle
- Debra Gwartney
- Julia Heydon
- Marianne Keddington-Lang
- Guy Maynard
- Win McCormack
- Camela Raymond
- Kate Sage
- Linny Stovall
- Rich Wandschneider
- Curt Yehnert
Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published biannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.
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Reading Houses: Orchard House
In 1868, at a crescent-moon desk in her room in Orchard House, Louisa May Alcott worked with a furious pen. In a few months she had written Little Women, recasting her Massachusetts house and its inhabitants so closely into their fictional counterparts that a visit to Orchard House, guests claim, is like walking through March House.
Its study reflects the intellectual interests of Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, a leader of the transcendental movement and a participant (with his family) in Fruitlands, a two-year experiment in communal living. This room, lined with the classics and books of philosophy and contemporary thought, became the meeting place of his Concord School of Philosophy.
However, "all of the philosophy in our house is not in the study," Louisa wrote. "A good deal is in the kitchen, where a fine old lady thinks high thoughts and does good deeds while she cooks and scrubs" --just like Marmie in Little Women. But Abigail Alcott, Louisa's mother and one of the first paid social workers in Massachusetts, wasn't the only "lady with high thoughts" in the kitchen. Her daughters joined her there to prepare meals, preserve food, scrub dishes, and wash and iron clothes, all the while voicing opinions about philosophy and politics that were lacking, we can assume, in no room in the house.
In the dining room Louisa and her sisters performed theatricals that audiences watched from the adjoining parlor under busts of Socrates and Plato. Around the table, the Alcott family's discourse about abolition, women's suffrage, and social reform shaped beliefs that became the basis of the March family's strong sense of ethics and social justice.
Louisa's room was both a sanctuary and a workplace where she could write, providing important income for the family. Here, too, she could vent her vivid imagination and calm her turbulent emotions. Her father built her desk and a bookcase for her favorite books. Her sister May, a talented and prolific artist, painted calla lilies beside the desk and an owl on the fireplace. In Louisa's room, as elsewhere in Orchard House, a sense of intellect, imagination, and family bonds provided the foundation for her novels.
--Diana Coogle
Published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.
© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities