CONCORD — On the one hand, Henry David Thoreau — who famously went to the woods here nearly two centuries ago because he “wished to live deliberately” — was a proponent of self-reliance. At the same ...

Henry David Thoreau’s mother, it is often said, did his laundry. The continued attraction of this old chestnut — debunked by Rebecca Solnit and Laura Dassow Walls, among others — is that it undermines ...