Mr. Russell Reed serves as Director of Indian Programming with the Innermost House Foundation in its American Wisdom Project at William & Mary. There he leads a variety of classroom and field courses, including the much-in-demand “Year in the Life of an American Indian” field series. Mr. Reed is a rare survival of our ancient past in America. In the present he has proudly served his country as an Infantry Soldier in the Army National Guard. This address is limited to members of the Military Officers Association of America.

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

Henry Thoreau’s essay, Walking, describes the art of sauntering as “Holy-Landing,” a crusade undertaken to reclaim the paradise of our beginnings. We welcome you to join us and discover the contemplative peace of a true autumn saunter through one of our most beautiful woodland landscapes here in Williamsburg. “So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.” 

In this second meeting of our new Circle Squared Conversations in the Town Square in Williamsburg at the foot of the oldest academic building in the United States, we continue our nine-month, coast-to-coast contemplative journey across America in place and time. This month’s reading is Henry Thoreau’s Walden, through which we shall seek a broader American meaning by triangulating Thoreau’s two years at the pond with the seven years of Innermost House in the woods and a century of the Virginia House in the Tidewater.

In this contemplative walking tour we trace the development of the Ideal City from the West’s first and most poetical work of philosophy to its last and most philosophical work of poetry, with Williamsburg’s Baroque City poised between. On Palace Green, we shall seek an “axis mundi,” a point at the center of the world where history stands still for a moment between heaven and earth, striving toward a vision of earthly paradise. What abiding aspiration of the human spirit is expressed in the streets and gardens and structures of 18th c. Williamsburg? Registration and CW Good Neighbor Pass required.

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

In this first meeting of our new Circle Squared Conversations in the Town Square in Williamsburg at the foot of the oldest academic building in the United States, we commence a nine-month, coast-to-coast contemplative journey across America in place and time. Our first reading is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s puritan tragedy, “Young Goodman Brown.”

Cultivating Wisdom: Life, Business, and Society explores what it means to think and act wisely—and how wisdom can guide human flourishing, responsible citizenship, ethical leadership, and a healthy democracy. Offered as a Reveley Interdisciplinary Fellowship course, this class brings together philosophy, psychology, and business to examine wisdom through the phenomenon of American Transcendentalism as both an ancient ideal and a practical skill for a modern life. ENROLLMENT FULL.

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

Of all conceptions born of medieval Europe, the most powerfully charged and widely adopted is the mind-altering idea of the university. Arising a thousand years ago, this one revolutionary idea has spread to nearly every nation in the world and all seven continents. The ancient campus of William & Mary centers upon the oldest academic buildings in the United States. The university preserves in brick and mortar the ancient human aspiration to universal knowledge, the ultimate object of which is the unity of the individual soul. In this walking tour we examine the local origins of a universal idea. 

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

What would it mean to live even one day of your life illuminated by the Inner Light? What secrets lie inward even of innerness? What is the Innermost Life? The ways of woodland life are mysterious today, yet their mystery lies not so much in themselves as in the dark glass through which they are viewed from the remove of our modern lives. In this shared journey of shared words and images, we seek the secrets of simplicity, of innocence and the beginning of things. The Innermost Life is nearer to us than we think, if we could once see into its secrets.

Through the formative century of American letters and beyond, Ralph Waldo Emerson was “the arch radical of the world.” Among the wider circle of Americans we remember as Transcendentalists, such individuals as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Muir, William James, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ansel Adams are practically unimaginable without the revolutionary influence of Emerson. This course will seek to recover the radical wisdom of the “Sage of Concord” as a means of bringing America’s revolutionary wisdom into focus, from the founding period to the closing of the western frontier.

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

Now a century after Ansel Adams took his first photograph, we almost cannot see nature except through his eyes. Yet those early 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, so help him God. Ansel Adams’ art was a radical act of the human imagination, to which we are all heirs today. In this course of striking masterworks and commentary, we seek to find our way back to the beginning, to see the world afresh through the lens of our greatest photographic artist.

The world looks to the example of America for many things: for the high road to opportunity, industry, progress and wealth; for ideals of freedom and equality; yet there is also the radically solitary road of personal independence, self-reliance, and wisdom. Progress and wisdom appear to run on parallel paths through American history, each defined by its own conception of the individual, on courses that seldom intersect. In this brief introduction to a complex tradition, we offer a radical re-imagining of the single-file “road less traveled” of “Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture.”

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

Of all conceptions born of medieval Europe, the most powerfully charged and widely adopted is the mind-altering idea of the university. Arising a thousand years ago, this one revolutionary idea has spread to nearly every nation in the world and all seven continents. The ancient campus of William & Mary centers upon the oldest academic buildings in the United States. The university preserves in brick and mortar the ancient human aspiration to universal knowledge, the ultimate object of which is the unity of the individual soul. In this walking tour we examine the local origins of a universal idea. 

Have you ever longed for Life in the Woods? The woods are more than trees and earth and sky. The woods are a way of being, of seeing and feeling the light. In this class set in the shadowy light of the autumn woods, Diana Lorence invites us to look and learn to see with woodland eyes and all our original senses. She draws on her seven years of solitude in the woods at Land’s End in California to let the forest teach us what meanings await in the woods of our memories and imaginations, illuminated by a Woodland Way of Seeing.

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

“When words lose their meaning, the people lose their freedom.” So observed Confucius 2500 years ago, though he might have been speaking to us today of our most urgent issues. Over the course of the past two revolutionary centuries, certain words of fundamental importance have so far lost their meaning as to reverse their import, at the cost of the very freedoms they purport to protect. What is freedom? What are words? What is meaning? In this course we will examine the meaning of six familiar words and endeavor to reclaim our inner freedom.

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.