This ninety-minute-long walking tour of the town and gardens along Palace Street in Colonial Williamsburg examines the city through the philosopher's eyes. Do gardens have meaning? Is architecture more than shelter and decoration? Is there a difference in Williamsburg and what difference does it make to us? What role can a city play in the pursuit of wisdom? Registration and Colonial Williamsburg Good Neighbor Pass required.

Henry Thoreau's beautiful essay “Walking” describes the art of walking as “Holy-Landing,” a crusade undertaken to reclaim the paradise of our beginnings. “We should go forth on the shortest walk,” he says, “in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return.” America once stood for a paradise regained of boundless forest and stream: a mythic landscape preserved from the beginnings of time. In this narrated woodland walk through the majestic Bassett Woods at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek the sources of American wisdom in the ancient forests that shaped the early nation.

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of numerous books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her most recent book is The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, which was published in June 2016 to coincide with and honor the centennial of the National Park Service. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. Watch the Recording Here.

Please join Peter Henriques, Professor Emeritus of History from George Mason University and leading authority on George Washington, for this summary series of seven lectures detailing the seven stages of Washington's life. Professor Henriques is the author of many books and articles on Washington, has served on the Editorial Board for the George Washington Papers and on the Mount Vernon Committee of George Washington Scholars, and presently guides the Innermost House Foundation as a member of the Advisory Council. Colonial Williamsburg event ticket required.

Please join Peter Henriques, Professor Emeritus of History from George Mason University and leading authority on George Washington, for this summary series of seven lectures detailing the seven stages of Washington's life. Professor Henriques is the author of many books and articles on Washington, has served on the Editorial Board for the George Washington Papers and on the Mount Vernon Committee of George Washington Scholars, and presently guides the Innermost House Foundation as a member of the Advisory Council. Colonial Williamsburg event ticket required.

Please join Peter Henriques, Professor Emeritus of History from George Mason University and leading authority on George Washington, for this summary series of seven lectures detailing the seven stages of Washington's life. Professor Henriques is the author of many books and articles on Washington, has served on the Editorial Board for the George Washington Papers and on the Mount Vernon Committee of George Washington Scholars, and presently guides the Innermost House Foundation as a member of the Advisory Council. Colonial Williamsburg event ticket required.

Henry Thoreau describes the art of walking as “Holy-Landing,” a crusade to reclaim the paradise of our beginnings. “We should go forth on the shortest walk in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return.” In this field trip to the woods of Surry County, we seek the sources of American home in the “Virginia House,” a transient building form now lost to history. Admixed of European, Native American, and African elements, this earliest of American dwellings is now being reconstructed using authentic historic methods and materials in the Native forests of our first minglings. Registration here.

Please join Peter Henriques, Professor Emeritus of History from George Mason University and leading authority on George Washington, for this summary series of seven lectures detailing the seven stages of Washington's life. Professor Henriques is the author of many books and articles on Washington, has served on the Editorial Board for the George Washington Papers and on the Mount Vernon Committee of George Washington Scholars, and presently guides the Innermost House Foundation as a member of the Advisory Council. Colonial Williamsburg event ticket required.

Please join Peter Henriques, Professor Emeritus of History from George Mason University and leading authority on George Washington, for this summary series of seven lectures detailing the seven stages of Washington's life. Professor Henriques is the author of many books and articles on Washington, has served on the Editorial Board for the George Washington Papers and on the Mount Vernon Committee of George Washington Scholars, and presently guides the Innermost House Foundation as a member of the Advisory Council. Colonial Williamsburg event ticket required.

This hour-long walking tour of the town and gardens along Palace Street in Colonial Williamsburg examines the city through the philosopher's eyes. Do gardens have meaning? Is architecture more than shelter and decoration? Is there a difference in Williamsburg and what difference does it make to us? What role can a city play in the pursuit of wisdom? Registration and Colonial Williamsburg Good Neighbor Pass required.

Please join Peter Henriques, Professor Emeritus of History from George Mason University and leading authority on George Washington, for this summary series of seven lectures detailing the seven stages of Washington's life. Professor Henriques is the author of many books and articles on Washington, has served on the Editorial Board for the George Washington Papers and on the Mount Vernon Committee of George Washington Scholars, and presently guides the Innermost House Foundation as a member of the Advisory Council. Colonial Williamsburg event ticket required.

Please join Peter Henriques, Professor Emeritus of History from George Mason University and leading authority on George Washington, for this summary series of seven lectures detailing the stages of Washington's life. Professor Henriques is the author of many books and articles on Washington, has served on the Editorial Board for the George Washington Papers and on the Mount Vernon Committee of George Washington Scholars, and presently guides the Innermost House Foundation as a member of the Advisory Council. Colonial Williamsburg event ticket required.

Henry Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond is as inseparable from the small house he built there as it is from the pond itself. But what was the meaning of the house at Walden? In this course, we take the Walden hut as our North Star in a triangulation of points spanning the American Wisdom Tradition from before the beginning to after the end. We examine the Virginia House in the Tidewater, the Walden hut in Concord, and the Innermost House in California to locate an archetypal form central to the New World culture of philosophical simplicity: the Primitive Hut in America. Registration required.

Have you ever longed for life in the woods? It is a longing that takes us back to our American beginnings. The woods are more than trees and earth and sky, the woods are a way of seeing. In this class we draw on the seven years of solitude lived in the woods at the Innermost House in California to examine our lives here in Williamsburg. What beginnings lay just beneath the surface of our lives here, hidden in the plain sight of home? What meanings exist to be read just behind our everyday experiences, illuminated by an Innermost Way of Seeing? Registration required.

Have you ever longed for life in the woods? It is a longing that takes us back to our American beginnings. The woods are more than trees and earth and sky, the woods are a way of seeing. In this class we draw on the seven years of solitude lived in the woods at the Innermost House in California to examine our lives here in Williamsburg. What beginnings lay just beneath the surface of our lives here, hidden in the plain sight of home? What meanings exist to be read just behind our everyday experiences, illuminated by an Innermost Way of Seeing? Registration required.

This hour-long walking tour of the town and gardens along Palace Street in Colonial Williamsburg examines the city through the philosopher's eyes. Do gardens have meaning? Is architecture more than shelter and decoration? Is there a difference in Williamsburg and what difference does it make to us? What role can a city play in the pursuit of wisdom? Registration and Colonial Williamsburg Good Neighbor Pass required.

Is there a compelling tradition of wisdom in American life? The world looks to the example of America for many things—for independence, for ideals of freedom and equality, for industry, wealth, and opportunity—but seldom for wisdom! Yet through the length of American history runs a current of “plain living and high thinking” that draws upon the world’s many wisdom traditions, at last to reflect that ancient light back to the world as something radically new. A highly visual introduction to the American Wisdom Tradition. Register here.

Through the formative century of American letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson was "the wisest American.” This course will seek to recover the wisdom of the "Sage of Concord" as a means of bringing America's larger wisdom tradition into focus, from the founding period to the closing of the western frontier.
Registration required.

At the heart of the earliest tradition of English settlement in North America lay what was perhaps the first independently American house-type to emerge from English precedent on New World soil, the “Virginia Frame” house. How could thousands of such houses and the civilization they represent have once populated the whole Chesapeake region, and then disappeared almost without a trace? What can the Virginia House tell us about who we would become as Americans? Classroom and optional field trip. Register here.

Now a century after Ansel Adams took his first photograph, we almost cannot see nature except through his eyes. Yet those photographs showed the world a nature it had never seen before: a revolutionary, brilliant refocusing on the Wilderness, the Whole Wilderness, and Nothing but the Wilderness. It was a radical act of the human imagination, to which we are all heirs today. In this course of striking masterworks and commentary, we shall seek to regain that radical vision, to see afresh through the lens of our greatest photographic artist. Registration required.

Before there were the streets of Williamsburg, there was the Virginia House, an architectural and cultural form uniting European, Native American, and African elements, standing at the threshold of an American Wisdom Tradition. Please join us for this culminating event of ten years’ search for recovered origins, our historic house raising deep in the woods of 17th century Jamestown’s southern shore. By Invitation.

This hour-long walking tour of the town and gardens along Palace Street in Colonial Williamsburg examines the city through the philosopher's eyes. Do gardens have meaning? Is architecture more than shelter and decoration? Is there a difference in Williamsburg and what difference does it make to us? What role can a city play in the pursuit of wisdom? Registration and Colonial Williamsburg Good Neighbor Pass required.

Robinson Jeffers was the great poet of California’s golden age, celebrated with T.S. Eliot as our greatest poet and with Eugene O’Neill as our greatest tragedian. His haunting lyrics and tragic dramas immortalized the wild Big Sur south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, his home for half a century. More than any one figure, he speaks for the collision between the American Wisdom Tradition and exploding modernity. His poetry asks the great questions of modern environmentalism: What is the best life for humankind? What are we in relation to nature?

Is there a compelling tradition of wisdom in American life? The world looks to the example of America for many things—for independence, for ideals of freedom and equality, for industry, wealth, and opportunity—but seldom for wisdom! Yet through the length of American history runs a current of “plain living and high thinking” that draws upon the world’s many wisdom traditions, at last to reflect that ancient light back to the world as something radically new. This course is a shortened version of the three-meeting introduction we have offered in the past, equally appropriate to new students as to those who have attended the longer course. A highly visual introduction to the American Wisdom Tradition. Register here.

Before there were the streets of Williamsburg, there was the Virginia House, an architectural and cultural form very different from all succeeding forms, yet which anticipated them in fundamental ways. At the heart of that earlier tradition lay what was perhaps the first house-type to emerge from English precedent on North American soil, the “Virginia Frame” house. How could thousands of such houses and the civilization they represent have once populated the whole Chesapeake region, and then disappeared almost without a trace? What can the Virginia House tell us about who we would become as Americans? Classroom and optional field trip. Register here.

What are the coordinates of an ethical understanding large enough to comprehend the rights of nature, successive layers of human culture, and modern societal interests? This talk will attempt to take an inclusive view of environmental ethics and ask if the same wilderness that once made Emerson and the philosophers “freemen of the forest laws” binds us as well with moral obligations as citizens of the Republic of Nature? Presented by Dr. Marianne Patinelli-Dubay, director of Environmental Philosophy Program at the SUNY College of Environmental Science. Please visit the Thoreau Society website (postponed).

This presentation will ask some fundamental questions about land use, self-reliance, and the political process from an African American point of view. The great Adirondack experiment of Timbuctoo failed and was forgotten in the violence and aftermath of the Civil War, but the dream it represented lives on in the soul of the nation. In what ways do we still stand at the edge of a wilderness, dreaming the dream of America? Presented by Mr. Stephen Seals, Senior Manager of African American Interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg. Please visit the Thoreau Society website (postponed).

This talk will look at what we know of the Native American experience in the region we now call the Adirondacks. American Indian peoples have occupied the region for thousands of years. The Mohawk and Mahican Tribes, both of the Iroquois Confederacy, were among the many layers of native peoples who made their home in the Adirondacks before the arrival of Europeans. Presented by Mr. Kody Grant of the Isleta Pueblo, a descendant of the Eastern Cherokee and Senior Interpreter in the American Indian Initiative at Colonial Williamsburg. Please visit the Thoreau Society website (postponed).

Of all the wilderness landscapes sacred to the New England transcendentalists, the “Great Northern Wilderness” we know today as Adirondack Park uniquely brings together and contrasts three cultures that shape the founding period of the nation: the Native American, the African American, and the European American. Each of these cultures is represented on this year’s IHF panel by a descendant who has made a profession of interpreting their inherited tradition. For information about tickets and the rest of the Annual Gathering program, please visit the Thoreau Society website (postponed).

This hour-long walking tour of the town and gardens along Palace Street in Colonial Williamsburg examines the city through the philosopher's eyes. Do gardens have meaning? Is architecture more than shelter and decoration? Is there a difference in Williamsburg and what difference does it make to us? Registration and Colonial Williamsburg Good Neighbor Pass required.