Henry David Thoreau is remembered as a grumpy hermit who fled civilization for a cabin in the woods, but the biographical record tells a very different story. This episode dismantles that myth, starting with his hereditary defiance (a grandfather who led a Harvard butter protest), his refusal to pay a five-dollar diploma fee, his resignation from a teaching job rather than strike students, and the progressive school he ran with his brother John before John's sudden death from lockjaw.

We also cover the parts of Thoreau's life that rarely make the poster: reverse-engineering European pencil manufacturing to save the family business, the brush fire that burned hundreds of acres before he moved to Walden, his night in jail for refusing a poll tax during the Mexican-American War, his pioneering observations on squirrels and forest succession, h ...