On 13 July, COL Michael Stoneham travelled to Concord, Massachusetts to attend the Annual Thoreau Gathering and Conference and the Alcott Summer Conversational Series and Teacher Institute. He presented two papers:  the first, "Reconsidering Thoreau's 'wooden men'; thinking about Soldiers, Dissent, and Political Culture in America" is a reflection on Thoreau's contention, in "Civil Disobedience," that the "mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies," his assertion that—on the whole—soldiers are "wooden men," beings who have willfully rejected that which distinguishes them as humans-their ability to think-and to then independently act on those thoughts.  The second paper, presented at the Alcott School of Philosophy, considers Thoreau's contemporaries and their devotion to hunting, noting that Thoreau believed that hunting was the introduction to the most informed life—the life of a poet—and one fully wakened to the significance of Nature and the symbiotic relation that every individual has with it.