Civil Disobedience is an essay that is usually published inside a book that contains other writing by Henry David Thoreau. The reason is because Civil Disobedience is extremely short. There’s enough room to put it at the end of Walden. My copy of Walden was a Barnes & Noble version that included not only Civil Disobedience, but also a timeline of Thoreau’s life, an introduction, and a detailed section that described the meaning behind some of Thoreau’s references that were commonly understood at the time, but mysterious and confusing today.
Civil Disobedience was written in response to real life events that Henry David Thoreau experienced. In 1846, he traveled through Massachusetts. His purpose was to go to Concord, to run an errand. (He needed to go to the cobblers to pick up his shoe that the cobbler repaired). A man named Sam Staples was the tax collector and warden of the county jail.
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