In October 1774, a vessel called the Peggy Stewart, owned by merchants James Dick and Anthony Stewart, arrived in Annapolis carrying tea. The tea had been loaded onto the ship by a merchant named Thomas Williams, who hoped to harm Dick and Stewart because of a business rivalry. Local merchants refused to pay the tax on the tea when the Peggy Stewart arrived and the ship might have been sent back had Stewart not learned that the ship also contained a load of indentured servants. The servants were not allowed to leave the ship until the tax was paid and if they stayed beyond a certain period of time they would be sent back to England, which would be a dangerous journey in the fall. Unwilling to risk the lives of the servants, Stewart paid the tax and allowed them to come ashore. He left the tea on board and told colonists he would do whatever they wanted with it. Stewart agreed to burn the tea, but a mob formed outside his house (while his wife was giving birth) and demanded he also burn his ship. Stewart did so.
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.
