While 600 chests of tea were en route to New York aboard a ship named the Nancy in late 1773, the merchants who had originally ordered the tea agreed that they wouldn't accept it. New York's governor, William Tryon, said he would let the tea-bearing ship land, but would not send any soldiers to protect the shipment. As word of the Boston Tea Party reached New York, tensions rose. But it was months before the Nancy, delayed by bad weather, actually showed up in New York. When the ship finally arrived in April 1774 a secret deal was cut and Tyron agreed that the tea from the Nancy wouldn't be allowed ashore. Meanwhile, the London, another tea-bearing ship, arrived. The captain of the London first denied that he had tea, but a crowd came aboard and searched the cargo, finding 18 chests of tea, some of which they dumped into the river. The next day, the colonists escorted the captain of the Nancy onto his boat and sent him away – with the Nancy's tea still unloaded. Unbeknownst to the crowd, however, the captain of the London, who had fled during the violence, stowed aboard the Nancy and made it out of New York safely.
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.
