Moments in time

Another author's story:

On September 6, 1847, writer Henry David Thoreau moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Mass, after living for two years in a shack he built himself on Walden Pond. In 1854, his collection of essays, "Walden, or Life in the Woods." is published.

Was Thoreau gay?

Thoreau's sexuality has long been a subject of speculation; even his contemporaries commented on his apparent lack of interest in conventional romance. The most exhaustive examination of the evidence on both sides of this question is Walter Harding's article, "Thoreau's Sexuality," published in the Journal of Homosexuality, 21.3 (1991): 23-45. Basing his conclusions mostly on evidence from Thoreau's Journal, Harding suggests that Thoreau's affectional orientation was probably homosexual, though there is no evidence that he was physically intimate with either men or women. Although Thoreau proposed marriage to one woman (and was proposed to by another), Harding concludes that the preponderance of the evidence indicates that he had a fundamental attraction to other men, an attraction sublimated through his writing and his passion for nature.

On September 7, 1813, the United States gets its nickname when a New York newspaper refers to "Uncle Sam." The name is linked to meat packer Samuel Wilson, who supplied barrels of beef to the United States Army during the War of 1812. Wilson stamped the barrels with "U.S." for United States, but soldiers began referring to the grub as "Uncle Sam's."