The family home was in an area known as Spindle Hill, and his father, Joseph Alcox, traced his ancestry to colonial-era settlers in eastern Massachusetts.

[2] At age six, young Bronson began his formal education in a one-room schoolhouse in the center of town but learned how to read at home with the help of his mother.

Alcott and Russell were initially concerned that the area would not be conducive to their progressive approach to education and considered establishing the school in nearby Philadelphia instead.

Channing also secured aid from Justice Lemuel Shaw and Boston mayor Josiah Quincy Jr.[38] On September 22, 1834, Alcott opened a school of about 30 students, mostly from wealthy families.

[41] The school was briefly famous, and then infamous, because of Alcott's method of "discarding text-books and teaching by conversation", his questioning attitude toward the Bible, and his reception of "a colored girl" into his classes.

[42] Before 1830, primary and secondary teaching of writing consisted of rote drills in grammar, spelling, vocabulary, penmanship and transcription of adult texts.

These reformers opposed beginning instruction with rules and preferred to have students learn to write by expressing their personal understanding of the events of their lives.

[44] He even went so far as to decorate his schoolroom with visual elements he thought would inspire learning: paintings, books, comfortable furniture, and busts or portraits of Plato, Socrates, Jesus, and William Ellery Channing.

[49] In the Boston Daily Advertiser, Nathan Hale criticized Alcott's "flippant and off hand conversation" about serious topics from the Virgin birth of Jesus to circumcision.

[53] Alcott was rejected by most public opinion and, by the summer of 1837, he had only 11 students left and no assistant after Margaret Fuller moved to Providence, Rhode Island.

[60] Alcott also wrote a series patterned after the work of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which was published in the Transcendentalists' journal, The Dial.

[66] Persuaded in part by Lane's abolitionist views, Alcott took a stand against President Tyler's plan to annex Texas as a slave territory and refused to pay his poll tax.

[67] Abby May wrote in her journal on January 17, 1843, "A day of some excitement, as Mr. Alcott refused to pay his town tax ... After waiting some time to be committed [to jail], he was told it was paid by a friend.

"[68] The incident inspired Henry David Thoreau, whose similar protest against the $1.50 poll tax led to a night in jail and his essay "Civil Disobedience".

[71] In July, Alcott announced their plans in The Dial: "We have made an arrangement with the proprietor of an estate of about a hundred acres, which liberates this tract from human ownership".

[71] Their goal was to regain Eden, to find the formula for agriculture, diet, and reproduction that would provide the perfect way for the individual to live "in harmony with nature, the animal world, his fellows, himself, [and] his creator".

"[78] One member, Samuel Bower, "gave the community the reputation of refusing to eat potatoes because instead of aspiring toward the sky they grew downward in the earth",[79] For clothing, they prohibited leather, because animals were killed for it, as well as cotton, silk, and wool, because they were products of slave labor.

[90] Louisa May Alcott, who was ten years old at the time, later wrote of the experience in Transcendental Wild Oats (1873): "The band of brothers began by spading garden and field; but a few days of it lessened their ardor amazingly.

On January 14, 1863, the Alcotts received a telegram that Louisa was sick; Bronson immediately went to bring her home, briefly meeting Abraham Lincoln while there.

The book, which fictionalized the Alcott family during the girls' coming-of-age years, recast the father figure as a chaplain, away from home at the front in the Civil War.

These "conversations" as he called them, were more or less informal talks on a great range of topics, spiritual, aesthetic and practical, in which he emphasized the ideas of the school of American Transcendentalists led by Emerson, who was always his supporter and discreet admirer.

He often discussed Platonic philosophy, the illumination of the mind and soul by direct communion with Spirit; upon the spiritual and poetic monitions of external nature; and upon the benefit to man of a serene mood and a simple way of life.

In 1880 the school moved to the Hillside Chapel, a building next to the house, where he held conversations and, over the course of successive summers, as he entered his eighties, invited others to give lectures on themes in philosophy, religion and letters.

It has continued functioning with a Summer Conversational Series in its original building at Orchard House, now run by the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association.

Alcott described his sustenance as a "Pythagorean diet": Meat, eggs, butter, cheese, and milk were excluded and drinking was confined to well water.

He further viewed a perfection of nature to the spirit and, in a sense, predicted modern environmentalism by condemning pollution and encouraging humankind's role in sustaining ecology.

He formulated no system of philosophy, and shows the influence of Plato, German mysticism, and Immanuel Kant as filtered through the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

"[141] In his later years, Alcott related a story from his boyhood: during a total solar eclipse, he threw rocks at the sky until he fell and dislocated his shoulder.

Shortly before his marriage, for example, his future father-in-law Colonel Joseph May helped him find a job teaching at a school in Boston run by the Society of Free Enquirers, followers of Robert Owen, for a lucrative $1,000 to $1,200 annual salary.

"[144] From the other perspective, the Alcotts created an environment which produced two famous daughters in different fields in a time when women were not commonly encouraged to have independent careers.