Hey, quick favor. We need your input. For a few weeks, this August, we are going to be giving

ourselves our usual late summer break, and as usual, we'll be running some favorites from the

archives. But this year, we are asking for your help in deciding what to run. In our newsletter,

we're going to be doing a series of votes on what episode we should feature each day.

So it's up to you to chime in,

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this daypod.com. We'll be sending on our first poll soon, so jump on it.

Hey there, Jody here from This Day headquarters. We are taking our usual late summer break. So for the next couple weeks, we are bringing you some favorites from the archives. Maybe you've heard them before. Maybe you haven't. Either way, we think these are worth spending some time with. And thanks to everyone who subscribes to our newsletter who helped vote on which episodes to rerun. This is a gentle reminder to subscribe to the newsletter. Also spread the word about the show to someone, leave a review, get in touch with an idea

for an episode at thisdaypod.com, and most importantly, enjoy the last few weeks of summer.

All right, here we go.

Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, August 14, 1846, Henry David Thoreau leaves the cabin where he was staying near Walden Pond.

He'd been living there alone for about a year at this point, and he walks into the nearby

town of Concord, Massachusetts. There he runs into the town tax collector, a man named Sam Staples,

who reminds Thoreau that he hadn't paid his poll tax in about six years or so. And Thoreau says, yeah, I'm not going to pay that poll tax. What are you going to do? Throw me in jail. And that is what Sam Staples does. He throws Thoreau in jail. Thoreau spends the night in jail. Ralph Waldo Emerson comes and visits him that night. And then Thoreau returns to his cabin. About a year later, he leaves the

woods, leaves Wadden Pond, and as we likely know, he writes that book that he is most famous for

Wadden Pond, also known as Life in the Woods. It would become a touchstone for those looking for a simpler

life, a connection to nature, but Thoreau's night in jail and his refusal to pay

that poll tax also tell us about his political side. He gave lectures and wrote several essays

on civil disobedience at the same time that he was talking about his time spent alone in the woods.

So let's talk about Henry David Thoreau, who we haven't really talked about on this

podcast, which I'm really kind of surprised to learn as I was researching this. We'll get into the

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