Just around the corner from Twain's Gothic mansion sits Harriet Beacher Stowe's Victorian cottage, plain by comparison. But Stowe was famous in her own right; her 1852 novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," sold 1 million copies in its first year. Also, like Twain, Stowe hopped around locations, living everywhere from Ohio to Maine. For the last 23 years of her life, however, Stowe lived in the area of Hartford known as "Nook Farm," which was home to several literary, political, and philosophical figures, Stowe and Twain among them. Stowe was not only a neighbor of Twain but a close friend as well, and they would often jaunt "across the lawn" to visit each other. A full-time writer after publishing "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Stowe produced several other works during her time at Nook, including "The American Woman's Home," "Lady Byron Vindicated," and "Pogunuc People."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
