Let's write about To Kill a Mockingbird as important required reading to teach students how to evaluate controversial themes

 The Enduring Educational Value of To Kill a Mockingbird

Published in ACTA, July 10, 2026 by Jane Mangelli. (American Council of Trustees and Alumni)

In recent years, the novel To Kill a Mockingbird has become a recurring subject within curriculum debates. 

Harper Lee's novel generated ongoing discussion about how literature can address questions of race, justice, and history and about the role of challenging texts in the classroom. 

Gregory Peck received an Academy Award in 1963, for best actor when he played the lead role as Atticus Finch in the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. His portrayal is considered to be the greatest movie hero in American cinema history.

These conversations raise an important question: What do students lose when schools shy away from teaching controversial but demanding works of literature❓ Harper Lee’s novel remains valuable not because it is beyond criticism, but because it yields meaning through interpretation. Its treatment of justice, prejudice, and moral responsibility invites disagreement rather than consensus, making the novel especially suited to support academic inquiry and civil discourse. The goal of reading such a text is not to arrive at a predetermined conclusion, but, rather, to examine how literature generates questions that resist easy resolutions.

Narrated through the character of Scout Finch’s limited perspective, the novel withholds complete understanding and forces readers to reconcile conflicting impressions about the people and events it depicts. Characters such as Atticus Finch and Boo Radley cannot be understood through simple stereotyping, and the novel’s portrayal of Maycomb, Alabama, exposes tensions between internal moral compasses and social convention. In the classroom, these complexities transform reading from an exercise in information gathering into an act of intellectual engagement. Students learn that meaning is not merely received from a text but constructed through analysis, evidence, and discussion.
According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s What Will They Learn?® project, only 22.2% of colleges and universities require literature in their general education curricula. As those requirements continue to decline, students lose exposure to great works like To Kill a Mockingbird and access to one of the few academic disciplines devoted to reflection and the examination of enduring questions. Literature places readers in direct contact with ambiguity and demands careful evaluation rather than immediate reaction. Students should seek out literature courses that aren’t afraid to embrace such thought-provoking texts as Harper Lee’s magnum opus. The value of To Kill a Mockingbird lies not in the answers it provides, but in the intellectual discipline it demands from its readers. In educational environments increasingly oriented towards measurable outcomes and immediate results, the book reminds us that some of the most important forms of learning come from sustained reflection. The question is not simply whether this novel should remain on reading lists, but whether students will continue to encounter writings that challenge them to think deeply about human experience and society. If current trends continue and these works are increasingly removed from curricula, students will be left to seek out this knowledge and intellectual challenge on their own rather than encountering it as part of a shared educational experience. Keeping works like To Kill a Mockingbird in the curriculum reflects a commitment to developing thoughtful readers who can grapple with difficult ideas rather than avoid them.

Let's write about Frank Capra - his autobiography and alternate biographies

 By Anthony Lane in The New Yorker

Frank Capra’s Mythmaking Magic

A new biography about the great director inspires wonder at his irresistible vision of America and his immigrant journey.

A multiple books review in one not too long article about books written to reset the narrative about Frank Capra (1897-1991), the renowned film director, screenwriter and producer.

This read is my first experience trying to wade through a review about multiple books where the purposes of the authors are to discredit Frank Capra's autobiography. Nevertheless, I prefer reading this review instead of the six hundred and fifty page long "Frank Capra: A Life" . Yet, I learned about the valuable talents of a cinematographer who Anthony Lane credits with creating the memorable imagery in some of Frank Capra's familiar films.

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, in Capra’s “It Happened One Night” (1934)

It happened one day, let us say, in the nineteen-eighties. You were checking into a hotel in La Quinta, half an hour or so from Palm Springs. As you entered the lobby, you were met by an in-house greeter: a funny little guy in a loud shirt, with a jacket and smile to match. Name of Frank. He was a regular there—been coming to the hotel forever. Back in the nineteen-thirties, he stayed there in what he called “a red-tiled adobe cottage” with a pal of his named Bob. They played a lot of tennis (Bob always won) and worked outside, in the sun, on a script for a movie. Frank said that they laughed so much, as they wrote, that they annoyed the other guests. You might recognize the title of the film: “It Happened One Night.”
The movie did O.K. Released in 1934, it earned a fistful of Academy Awards—the full hand, including Best Picture. Its stars, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, were crowned Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively. Robert Riskin’s screenplay was victorious. The Oscar for Best Director was handed to his tennis buddy, Frank Capra, thereby satisfying a long-held hunger. “I wanted an Academy Award very badly,” Capra confessed. “All nutty people think that way.”

The story of his nuttiness has been told before. Capra’s autobiography, “The Name Above the Title,” was published in 1971, dedicated to—among others—Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, and Jean Harlow and prefaced by a canticle of praise from Capra’s fellow-director John Ford. “There isn’t a dull paragraph in the entire book,” Ford wrote. So suspect was the lack of dullness that a stern corrective was required, and it arrived with “Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success” (1992), by Joseph McBride, who compiled a thorough and chastening tally of Capra’s flaws, both personal and political. The author of “The Name Above the Title,” McBride warned us, was not a man to be trusted:

One of the ways Capra made his fairy-tale account of his life seem believable was by mingling self-serving episodes with ones that gave the impression of ruthless candor toward his own failings but that actually served to paper over even more damning aspects of his life, the parts he found unspeakable, the parts the book was concocted to conceal.
Whoa. McBride returned to the fray in 2019, with “Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra,” in which he detailed the dastardly efforts of his publishers to hamper and curtail (or, as some would say, edit) his prolonged undoing of the Capra myth in his earlier book. It was as if the emotional lifeblood that courses through Capra’s most rousing film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939)—a fable of one hardy fellow railing against a corrupted system—had leaked into the soul of his biographer. Why the transfusion? Many directors, heaven knows, make it their lucrative business to get under our skin or clutch at our hearts, but there is something about the person of Capra, as disclosed in his memoir and in his uneasy masterworks, that seems uniquely calculated to enrapture and disturb.
Now we have a fresh take on the issue. “Frank Capra: A Life” (Harper), by Sam Wasson, is hefty and dense, like “The Catastrophe of Success,” but altogether less corrosive in its tone. You can tell a fair amount about a biography from its opening chords, so it’s notable that McBride starts with a “ferocious attack of diarrhea” that was suffered by Capra when, as a movie director of global renown, he went back, in 1977, to the village where he was born. Wasson, by contrast, kicks off by quoting three letters from prisoners in San Quentin, from 1947, addressed to the warden. All of them praise a film that has recently been shown at the jail—Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” with James Stewart. “It gives rhyme and reason for existing,” one inmate writes. And the moral is: like a movie star, Capra can be shot from multiple angles. Take your pick.
In theatrical terms, the life of Frank Capra had a hell of a run, like a Broadway musical that never seems to close. Born in 1897, as the Klondike gold rush was swelling into a stampede, he didn’t expire until 1991. Like many of those who believe, with evangelical fervor, in the gospel of American opportunity, Capra sprang from elsewhere. His full name was Francesco Rosario Capra, and he came from Bisacquino, a village in Sicily. Head north from there, toward Palermo, and you find yourself going via the town of Corleone—the cradle of another kid who went west and made it big.
Capra’s father, Salvatore, an impoverished farmer, possessed what McBride calls “the poetic soul of a troubadour.” Translation: he was a bum. But the boy’s mother, Rosaria, was a do-it-all force of nature, and it was she who shepherded five of her flock—Salvatore, Francesco, and three of her daughters—all the way to California, in 1903, where one of her older children, who had emigrated five years before, awaited them. Unlike the curiously pristine ship that brings the future patriarch of the Corleone clan into New York Harbor in “The Godfather Part II,” the S.S. Germania, which bore the Capras across the Atlantic, was a lurching tub of horror. Capra recalled “thirteen days of stench and misery in steerage.”
Wasson is unambiguous about the state of mind in which the young Capra disembarked in the New World. “Francesco had no home, no memories of value,” he writes. “What he had was hate.” Strong stuff, and the biographer backs it up with extra psychological unpeeling: “In his mother and father, in what their peasant heritage and personal failures had deposited in him, lay the seeds of self-loathing, Capra’s wellspring of preternatural ambition and its shadows, the fear of being returned, like a bad avocado, to the peasant class he came from.” So now you know. As the kid grew up in Los Angeles, shining shoes, selling newspapers, and vowing, unlike the rest of his family, to get an education, one impulse drove him on. He would not just be top banana. He would be a premium-grade avocado.
At the age of twelve, Capra went to Manual Arts High School. From there, in 1915, he went on to Throop Polytechnic Institute (soon to become Caltech), a move that inspires Wasson, peering into his hero’s internal superstructure, to channel Ayn Rand: “Engineers, not priests, bent the universe to fit the dreams of men. Skyscrapers, bridges, foundries!” Capra won a travel scholarship—Buffalo, Boston, New York City!—and, the following year, wrote an essay about film. Its bombast suggests that Capra, too, had a rash of Randian fever (i.e. Ayn Rand): The motion picture will be, and is now, a very vital modifier of social, and consequently, of economic conditions, and its influence is going to be for the better of humankind.
In the meantime, however, humankind was not there to be bettered. It was there to be worsted, sweet-talked, and conned. After surviving the Spanish flu and polishing his skills as a wandering huckster, selling flaky mining stock to the gullible, Capra jammed a foot in the door at Montague Studios, in San Francisco, and ended up directing a one-reeler, “Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House” (1922), less than twelve minutes long and based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling. Though the actors are not so much hammy as salt-encrusted, Capra keeps them bustling about within the frame. This was not his first experience of the trade; in 1919, he had briefly worked at a studio in Los Angeles, but the toil had been janitorial—“cleaning up the horseshit,” he said. Now, even if he hadn’t yet made something of himself, he had at least made something. It was better than manure.

Why is it that tales of the infancy and the adolescence of Hollywood retain their zest? “Frank Capra: A Life” is more than six hundred and fifty pages long, and it has much to say about Capra’s activities during the Second World War—among other projects, he made seven propaganda films under the banner of “Why We Fight”—and the oddly changing fortunes of “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946); yet what grabbed me, above all, was the legend, reported by Wasson with a raised eyebrow, of Mack Sennett’s coming to Los Angeles in 1912 and starting to shoot the first Keystone comedy half an hour after arriving in town. The very creation of the industry was verging on the comic in its breakneck brio. It was as if Henry Ford had begun building his first Model T while he was already on the road, merrily adding doors and gears as he rolled along.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1923, Capra married an actress named Helen Howell. The following year, thanks in part to a recommendation from his best man, he was hired as a gag writer. He worked for Hal Roach, who would later oversee the glorious ascension of Laurel and Hardy. From there, Capra went to Sennett, in whose domain the pressure to provide a stream of funny business, on tap, was unrelenting. In such an environment, Capra’s college degree meant less than nothing. One of Sennett’s mantras was “No gags in books.”
In spite—or because—of that emphasis on the purely physical, Capra thrived. In the words of a colleague, “When he wanted to get over how funny a plumber could be, lying on his back under a kitchen sink, he would sprawl on the floor and make like a plumber.” The next step was the most perilous stunt of all: Capra would make like a director. One of Sennett’s stars was Harry Langdon, the definition of what Macbeth calls a “cream-faced loon.” To our eyes, his eminence is baffling, but Capra got the point. “Chaplin thought his way out of tight situations; Keaton suffered through them stoically; Lloyd overcame them with speed. But Langdon trusted his way through adversities,” Capra wrote in his memoir. Armed with that acuity, he directed Langdon in “The Strong Man” (1926) and “Long Pants” (1927). Then, with the insouciance of Daniel strolling into the lions’ den, he went to work for Harry Cohn.
So much has been written about Cohn, the roaring beast who ran Columbia Pictures, that it’s easy to overlook his genius for finding and fostering talent. The studio was on Gower Street, off Sunset Boulevard, which meant that it was on Poverty Row, which in turn meant that—unlike M-G-M, say, or Paramount—its facilities were crummy and its budgets were laced up tight. But, as Capra conceded to Cohn, the personnel were great. “You can bet your Aunt Tilly’s tits they’re great,” Cohn replied, adding, “Get to work, you damn Dago.” Cohn was a comprehensive bastard with a mouth like a soil pipe, and the way to deal with him, as Capra rapidly twigged, was to stand up straight, take your lumps, and lump him right back again. What got you fired (as opposed to being merely in bad odor, which would wash off after a while) was indecision, and one thing that rises from Wasson’s pages is Capra’s knack for seizing the initiative, marshalling his troops, and marching on.
One example: on Monday, July 9, 1928, Capra surprised the cast and crew of “Submarine,” a new Columbia production, by showing up on set and assuming control. The previous director had been sacked over the weekend, and Capra had read the script on Saturday. In short, if your movie needed saving, he was your guy; if someone else had chickened out or lost the plot, he would chicken in. He had already done so for “The Strong Man,” and he would do it again for “American Madness” (1932), one of his finest early pictures, for which he insisted on reshooting everything that had been filmed by other hands and even on having the set rebuilt. Henceforth, the movie would be molded by his hands. Among those observing the process was the film’s sound man, Edward Bernds, who later said, “I fully realized, for the first time, what directing really was.”
Given such authority, it’s no wonder that Capra could command enduring loyalty. Bernds, who collaborated with him through to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” was one of the gang. Others included the editor William Hornbeck; the assistant director Art Black, an ex-plumber who was famous for the candor of his instructions on set (“Don’t just stand there like somebody’s milking you”); and the screenwriters Riskin and Jo Swerling—“a squat, heavy-set, seething young man, furiously chain-smoking strong White Owl Cigars,” as he is described in “The Name Above the Title.” With a lovely Dickensian flourish, Capra adds, “One got the odd impression the cigar was smoking the man.” McBride is indignant on behalf of these and other invaluable folk, accusing Capra of sidelining their contributions to the films he directed. Ingratitude is indeed sharper than a serpent’s tooth, and McBride isn’t wrong, but since when has Hollywood not been a pit of snakes? Every year, as we see Oscar winners churning out thanks to their agents, their deities, and everyone in between, we can’t help hearing the chant inside their heads: “This is all mine and not yours.”
In his autobiography, Capra is, without a doubt, a hundred times less reliable than Wasson and McBride. The darnedest thing is that he’s also ten times zippier. (“As with heroin, the antidote for film is more film,” he tells us. “It bosses the enzymes.”) What matters to Capra diehards is that, when you treat yourself to almost any of his features from 1930 to the outbreak of war, you feel swept along by the efforts of a well-drilled outfit. Was it a happy ship? Not in the case of “Lost Horizon” (1936), for sure, which was about a quest for Shangri-La, and which, thanks to reshoots and overruns, cost twice its original budget. On the other hand, don’t forget a handsome tribute that was paid by Clark Gable, who was loaned out by M-G-M for “It Happened One Night.” He showed up at Capra’s office drunk, but soon realized that the change of air might just do him, and his image, good. According to Bernds, “I think what Gable felt when he came to Columbia was, ‘Jesus Christ, picture making can be fun!’ ” Two weeks into the shoot, Gable said to his co-star, “You know, I think this wop’s got something.”
If that movie doesn’t give you a healthy jolt, ninety-two years on, you should probably try another art form. What hits you, aside from its momentum and the lightness of its wit, is how absurdly beautiful it is, and with what ease the beauty kindles a sensuality so unexpected that it’s virtually a twist. The celebrated haystack sequence, in which a roguish reporter (Gable) fashions a couple of scratchy beds, by moonlight, for himself and a wealthy heiress (Colbert), who lies there and looks over her shoulder at him in a trance of desire, belongs to the world of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The resident Titania is Joseph Walker, Capra’s favored cinematographer and, for what it’s worth, a hero of mine.
Born in Denver in 1892, Walker had a feline taste for the dark, especially if the silk of it was shot through with light. To double the magic, running water could be added to the mix. Check out Jean Harlow and Robert Williams, in Capra’s “Platinum Blonde” (1931), leaving a bright soirée for a shadowy garden, the better to make out behind a fountain that transforms their kisses into a rippling blur. (Williams, who used his dialogue to muse aloud and fast, as if life were on the verge of comic verse, died of complications from a burst appendix days after the movie opened. His loss was, and remains, a calamity.) Walker was also a dab hand at hats, the gradual disappearance of which from American heads has been indisputably bad news for motion pictures; what could be nobler than Gary Cooper, in Capra’s “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936), gazing down at Jean Arthur with raindrops gleaming on his trilby’s brim?Hang on, though. Given that a similar rain drips from Cary Grant’s hat in Howard Hawks’s “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939), during an unforgettable deathbed scene, and that Walker was the director of photography on both films, what’s so special about Capra? Aren’t both masters being served by the same supreme technician, and doesn’t he deserve the credit? True, yet each movie has a distinct social mood—tenser for Capra, looser for Hawks—and it is Capra who seems more discernible, so to speak, at the forefront of the action, whereas Hawks is content to hang out behind the arras.
For further proof, I refer you to a couple of trailers from 1941. First, Hawks’s “Ball of Fire,” which begins with the phrase “What a Pair of Gams!” blazoned across the screen before glancing at the plot and announcing the leading players, Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Only in the last ten seconds does Hawks rate a mention. Compare this to Capra’s “Meet John Doe,” released a few months before. It, too, stars Cooper and Stanwyck, but they get second billing in the trailer. Instead, in gigantic letters, up come the words “Frank Capra,” followed by a slow crawl of the kind that we associate with “Star Wars,” listing the director’s earlier triumphs in chronological order. Then, at the end, a homely touch—“It’s your story, and it’s great!”—and a final plug for Capra. You get the feeling that, as far as he was concerned, his name belonged not just above the title but before, after, and practically instead of it.

It is the puff of that self-belief, in part, that provokes the ire of Capra’s detractors. “One man, one film,” he said, and in that preëmptive claim to the status of an auteur he left himself open to censure. Yet Capra’s movies from his golden years do look and sound like his and nobody else’s, with their signature blend of blends: the loner and the bunch of pals, the cracker-barrel and the wisecrack, and the accelerating narrative that finds time to stop and stare. For Capra, as for Dickens, a mob could be either a chorus, pleading for justice, or a milling source of dread. Death itself could be used as a tool. Near the start of “Meet John Doe,” a journalist played by Stanwyck (the archetypal Capra actress) chatters like a ticker tape about her fancy plan—find a hobo to play a hobo who might jump from the top of City Hall. It’s really no joke, but the glee of her riff somehow turns it into a lark.
Nothing about Capra is weirder, to be honest, than the way in which, from one film of his to the next, suicide tugs at our sleeve. In “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1933), the tea is lethal, and the General knowingly drinks it; in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” a disgraced senator pulls a gun on himself and cries, “I’m not fit to live!”; and, in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” James Stewart, as George Bailey, leans over the parapet of a bridge with maddened eyes, while the river roils below. How did such a nightmare end up as America’s most beloved Christmas movie? Because George is saved by an angel, I guess, and by generous mounds of cash.

As for Capra’s politics, search me. Readers of McBride’s 1992 book were alarmed by the revelation that Capra was a flinty Republican who voted against Roosevelt “because I thought he was getting too big for the country’s good.” However, as Wasson informs us, when the first of the “Why We Fight” documentaries, “Prelude to War,” was shown at the White House, in 1942, all of Capra’s reservations dissolved with one shake of the President’s hand. (“Every man, woman, and child in the world must see this film,” F.D.R. said to the assembled gathering.) Bernds reckoned that Capra was “muddled and reactionary.” To the screenwriter Julius Epstein, he was “a right-wing populist.” At the same time, Epstein said, “I was not sure how he felt outside his pictures.”
There’s the rub. It’s the pictures that do the talking, and the raging, and—if Cooper is around—the keeping mysteriously quiet. The fact that Capra’s political persuasions, such as they are, fail to square with the deeds of his protagonists is more of a relief, I’d say, than a reason to charge him with hypocrisy. Who wants to watch a film that unwaveringly demonstrates the voting intentions of its maker? The crazed filibuster that concludes “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (Stewart, as Jefferson Smith, had his throat dabbed with dichloride of mercury to make him hoarse) sounds more ominous than uplifting in the age of Donald Trump, and the reactions to the film were equally nuts. James F. Byrnes, a Democratic senator from South Carolina, protested that “the thing was outrageous, exactly the kind of thing that dictators of totalitarian governments would like to have their subjects believe exists in a democracy.” Wrap your head around that.

“Mr. Smith” was written by Sidney Buchman, a card-carrying Communist. Riskin, who wrote for Capra to miraculous effect for a decade, starting in 1931, was snappier, subtler, and less ideologically heated, but he, too, was nonetheless a man of the left. (He was also a swell; he dated Carole Lombard and married Fay Wray, which must have been a scream.) The point is that Capra surrounded himself with the best and the smartest, whatever flavor they came in; Stanwyck, Colbert, Gable, Cooper, and Stewart were all solid Republicans, and it’s unlikely that Capra gave more of a damn about their politics than their adoring public did. A movie screen is a dream, not a pamphlet. “What did Capra want to say in his films?” McBride asks, but we don’t watch them for the sake of the saying. What they bequeath to us is not a set of ideas but the fluent, rhythmical beat of a story and a treasury of looks.
The decline of Capra, in the wake of the Second World War, was a sorry spectacle. He made many films after “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but the wonders pretty much ceased. In 1951, he was invited by the president of Caltech, his alma mater, to join a secret Cold War think tank, but was denied security clearance; in a bid to prove his worthiness, he named the names of left-wing sympathizers, including Buchman. (Among the sins of which McBride accuses Capra, this midlife ratting may be the gravest.) Ornery, unwanted, and adrift, Capra found his schemes for movies running out of gas. A bio-pic of St. Paul, starring Frank Sinatra, was never going to fly, though I can’t help imagining the result (“How ya doin’, Colossians?”).
Yet, all was not lost. With his second wife, Lucille, whom he had married in 1932, after his first marriage foundered, Capra went to live on a ranch that he had bought in Fallbrook, a hundred miles from Hollywood. He planted fruit trees and produced his own olive oil. Later, the Capras moved to Palm Springs, where he played golf with Gerald Ford and Barry Goldwater. That may not be everybody’s notion of delight, but each to his own. There is a heartening swing, too, in the final chapters of Wasson’s book, as we learn that the maker of “American Madness” got to watch “Mean Streets”—“a helluva beautiful picture,” he called it—and, after the publication of “The Name Above the Title,” began to revel in the company of students, who lapped up his tales of times past (or, for McBride, “his self-aggrandizing pseudopersonality”). For their benefit, he would take apart the mechanism of an old movie, like a clockmaker, and explain how it had been put together.
What kept Capra all wound up and ticking? Wasson detects a lingering resentment in the poor Sicilian kid gazing up at the idle rich. “He would get them. If it would take his whole life, he would get them,” Wasson writes. But where, exactly, is that hatred to be found in the films? They seem tolerant rather than vengeful, and a movie like “Platinum Blonde” is far more amused than appalled by the antics of the well-to-do. Where Capra did strike back was in the sheer vigor of his anti-idleness; he did so much so well, and, if he was amazed by the country he lived in, and confused by what sort of place—horrific or tranquil—it might yet become, well, he is hardly alone in his bewilderment. It was John Cassavetes, a director about as distant from Capra as one can be, who delivered the most haunting homage of all. “Maybe there really wasn’t an America,” he said. “Maybe it was only Frank Capra.” ♦

Let's Write about how the Statue of Liberty united two nations: France and United States friendship

On this day in 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. 

Published in The Forum

October 28, 2026, by Monica Boryczewski

Liberty: The Uniter of Nations

Proposed as a gift by French abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye, the statue was created to celebrate the centennial of America’s independence and to rekindle the Franco-American alliance forged during the American Revolutionary War. 

However, this “new colossus” was more than just a present. She represented the two nations’ turbulent history: their friendship first united by liberty, and its sudden end when France replaced that common value with political ideologies during its own revolution. The tale embodies the warning in George Washington’s Farewell Address against the deadly threat of political factionalism.

Before the War of Independence, the American colonies viewed France with suspicious hostility. The French and Indian War, which had embroiled the land for nine years until 1763, was still in recent memory. However, past grievances were soon forgotten after the Declaration of Independence. The French, inspired by the colonists’ desire for freedom, were eager to weaken their mutual English enemy and agreed to an alliance in 1776. Under the unifying banner of liberty, the two militaries secured several victories, most notably the Battle of Yorktown, which ended the war. By setting aside their differences for a shared purpose, France and America defeated Britain’s superior naval forces. Both countries agreed to retain their partnership after the war, but this new friendship would soon be tested.

On July 14, 1789, French supporters of the National Assembly stormed the Bastille, killing the garrison’s commander and several permanent officers. Despite this violence, many in the States applauded the French Revolution. They wanted the nation to follow in their footsteps and form another country dedicated to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” However, as the bloodshed increased, including King Louis XVI’s execution, American support wavered. Unlike in the War of Independence, the original, unifying purpose of the French Revolution was forgotten. The numerous political factions were only focused on outdoing each other. Divided against herself, France quickly succumbed to chaos. President Washington, wary of embroiling his country in another war, issued the Proclamation of Neutrality. It announced that the United States would remain neutral in foreign affairs and declined to send aid to France. The friendship once united by liberty was severed, and without internal stability, the French Revolution merely paved the way for Napoleon’s eventual dictatorship.

Washington, likely inspired by developments in France, warned in his Farewell Address against “the batteries of internal and external enemies” that would seek to destroy the United States. Among the internal threats, he named political factions as particularly dangerous. Washington urged the people not to dwell on petty differences, but on the commonality they all shared as Americans. “The name of American, which belongs to you . . . must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. . . . The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts—of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” 

Only by focusing on their shared status as countrymen and by valuing freedom above fleeting political opinions could the people of the United States avoid France’s fate. Washington’s words told a simple truth, and that truth inspired the French abolitionist and U.S. Constitution expert Édouard de Laboulaye nearly a century later.

By 1865, France had already endured five political regimes. Now, during the Second French Empire, the people were again divided. Some favored a monarchical system, while others, including Édouard de Laboulaye, yearned for democracy. However, unlike some contemporaries, he believed liberty must be achieved lawfully and peacefully, not through violence. He proposed giving America a sculpture, Liberty Enlightening the World, to commemorate the centennial celebration of its independence. With the statue, Laboulaye desired to restore the Franco-American friendship and remind France that freedom was the natural order and right of all peoples. Hundreds from both countries attended its dedication ceremony on Bedloe’s Island. Liberty had once again united the two nations.

The history represented by the Statue of Liberty contains a twofold message. It shows that individuals united by common moral values can produce lasting achievements. However, like Washington, it warns how easily such triumphs are undone through internal division. In this polarized age, Americans must not place political differences ahead of their mutual freedom. Otherwise, the United States will follow France’s tragic example and lose its liberty in self-destruction.

Donald Trump is protecting evil Vladimir Putin: America need even more economic sanctions against Russia

We need more economic sanctions against Russia echo opinion published in the Columbia Missourian news: 

I am extremely disappointed that Donald Trump recently decided to buy diesel fuel from Russia even though a 2022, law bans fuel imports from Russia.

Strong economic sanctions are needed to end Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine, which has already killed over 500,000 people and has caused over $2 trillion in economic damage.

Our European allies understand the crucial need for tough economic sanctions against Russia. When I attended a peace rally on Oct. 3, 2023, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, many speakers called for stronger economic sanctions against Russia. On that same day in Berlin, I joined hundreds of people (including many children) praying for Ukrainian peace at the Memorial for Murdered Jews.

I urge our political leaders to promote an end to the Ukrainian War through tough economic sanctions against Russia.

From: Luke Curtis, MD MS CIH, is a resident of Jefferson City, a medical writer and former Mizzou biochemistry graduate student.

Let's write about Henry David Thoreau

 Retrospectively, what is amazing about this rather long and sometimes too scientific essay is how Henry David Thoreau, in writing this essay, obviously had no access to anything like a Google search, AI or any other research technologies. 

Published in 1862 in The Atlantic magazine. A free Internet download is also available at this site here.

Thoreau traces the apple's journey from ancient Greece, mythology (like the garden of Alcinous and Tantalus), and prehistoric Swiss lake dwellings to the New England landscape.

He relied on his own curiosity and writing talent to aggregate information about the simple concept of an apple. After scanning through this essay, you might want to jump to the last paragraph. Thoreau certainly could not have anticipated just how successful the apple industry has become.

Wild Apples: The History of the Apple-Tree

By Henry David Thoreau

Republished from the 1862, edition of The Atlantic Magazine.


Geologists tell us that the order of the Rosaceœ, which includes the Apple, also the true Grasses, and the Labiatœ, or Mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on the globe.

It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of the Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of Rome, so old that they had no metallic implements. An entire black and shriveled Crab-Apple has been recovered from their stores.

Tacitus says of the ancient Germans, that they satisfied their hunger with wild apples (agrestia poma) among other things.

Niebuhr observes that “the words for a house, a field, a plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to agriculture and the gentler way of life, agree in Latin and Greek, while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase are utterly alien from the Greek". Thus the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive.

The apple was early so important, and generally distributed, that its name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general. Mhlon, in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general.

The apple-tree has been celebrated by the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians. Some have thought that the first human pair were tempted by its fruit. Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it, dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it.

The apple tree is mentioned in at least three places in the Old Testament, and its fruit in two or three more. Solomon sings,—“As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.” And again,—“Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples.” The noblest part of man's noblest feature is named from this fruit, “the apple of the eye.”

The apple-tree is also mentioned by Homer and Herodotus. Ulysses saw in the glorious garden of Alcinous “pears and pomegranates, and apple-trees bearing beautiful fruit” (kai mhleai aglaokarpoi). And according to Homer, apples were among the fruits which Tantalus could not pluck, the wind ever blowing their boughs away from him.

Theophrastus knew and described the apple-tree as a botanist.

According to the Prose Edda, “Iduna keeps in a box the apples which the gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste of to become young again. It is in this manner that they will be kept in renovated youth until Ragnarök” (or the destruction of the gods).

I learn from Loudon that “the ancient Welsh bards were rewarded for excelling in song, by the token of the applespray”; and “in the Highlands of Scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the clan Lamont.”

The apple-tree, (Pyrus malus) belongs chiefly to the northern temperate zone. London says, that “it grows spontaneously in every part of Europe, except the frigid zone, and throughout Western Asia, China, and Japan.” We have also two or three varieties of the apple indigenous in North America. The cultivated apple-tree was first introduced into this country by the earliest settlers, and it is thought to do as well or better here than anywhere else. Probably some of the varieties which are now cultivated were first introduced into Britain by the Romans.

Pliny, adopting the distinction of Theophrastus, says,—“Of trees there are some which are altogether wild (sylvestres), song more, civilized (urbaniores).” Theophrastus includes the apple among the last; and, indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees. It is as harmless as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valuable as flocks and herds. It has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is more humanized; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be no longer traceable to its wild original? It migrates with man, like the dog and horse and cow: first, perchance from Greece to Italy, thence to England: thence to America; and our Western emigrant is still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his load. At least a million apple-trees are thus set farther westward this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. Consider how the Blossom-Week, like the Sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the prairies; for when man migrates, he carries with him not only his birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sword, but his orchard also.

The leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable food to many domestic animals, as the cow, horse, sheep, and goat; and the fruit is sought after by the first, as well as by the hog. Thus there appears to have existed a natural alliance between these animals and this tree from the first. “The fruit of the Crab in the forests of France” is said to be “a great resource for the wild-boar.”

Not only the Indian, but many indigenous insects, birds, and quadrupeds, welcomed the apple-tree to these shores. The tent-caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed, and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry; and the canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. As it grew apace, the blue-bird, robin, cherry-bird, king-bird, and many more, came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. It was an era in the history of their race. The downy woodpecker found such a savory morsel under its bark, that he perforated it in a ring, quite round the tree, before he left it,—a thing which he had never done before, to my knowledge. It did not take the partridge long to find out how sweet its buds were, and every winter eve she flew, and still flies, from the wood, to pluck them, much to the farmer's sorrow. The rabbit, too, was not slow to learn the taste of its twigs and bark; and when the fruit was ripe, the squirrel half-rolled, half-carried it to his hole; and even the musquash crept up the bank from the brook at evening, and greedily devoured it, until he had worn a path in the grass there; and when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the jay were glad to taste it occasionally. The owl crept into the first apple-tree that became hollow, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for him; so settling down into it, he has remained there ever since.

My theme being the Wild Apple, I will merely glance at some of the seasons in the annual growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to my special province.

The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. The walker is frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually handsome one, whose blossoms are two-thirds expanded. How superior it is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored nor fragrant!

By the middle of July, green apples are so large as to remind us of coddling, and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little ones which fall still-born, as it were,—Nature thus thinning them for us. The Roman writer Palladius said,—“If apples are inclined to fall before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them.” Some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones which we see placed to be overgrown in the forks of trees. They have a saying in Suffolk, England,—

At Michaelmas time, or a little before,

Half an apple goes to the core.

Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more to scent your hand-kerchief with than any perfume which they sell in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona,—carrying me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.

A week or two later, as you are going, by orchards or gardens, especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price, and without robbing anybody.

There is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold.

No mortal has ever enjoyed the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the god-like among men begin to taste its ambrosial qualities. For nectar and ambrosia are only those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates fail to perceive,—just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing, it. When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it. Pliny says that apples are the heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin to sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. Our driver begins to lose his load the moment he tries to transport them to where they do not belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. Though he gets out from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, I see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going to market. They are not apples, but pomace. Are not these still Iduna's apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and think you that they will let Loki or Thjassi carry them off to Jötunheim, while they grow wrinkled and gray? No, for Ragnarök, or the destruction of the gods, is not yet.

There is another thinning of the fruit, commonly near the end of August or in September, when the ground is strewn with windfalls; and this happens especially when high winds occur after rain. In some orchards you may see fully three quarters of the whole crop on the ground, lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet hard and green,—or, if it is a hill-side, rolled far down the hill. However, it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. All the country over, people are busy picking up the windfalls, and this will make them cheap for early apple-pies.

In October, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct in the trees. I saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit than I remembered to have ever seen before, small yellow apples banging over the road. The branches were gracefully drooping with their weight, like a barberry-bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new character. Even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect, spread and drooped in all directions; and there were so many poles supporting the lower ones, that they looked like pictures of banian-trees. As an old English manuscript says, “The mo appelen the tree bereth, the more sche boweth to the folk.”

Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. That should be the “going” price of apples.

Between the fifth and twentieth of October I see the barrels lie under the trees. And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some choice barrels to fulfil an order. He turns a specked one over many times before he leaves it out. If I were to tell what is passing in my mind, I should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualifies leave it. Cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length I see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees.

It would be well, if we accepted these gifts with more joy and gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of compost about the tree. Some old English customs are suggestive at least. I find them described chiefly in Brand's “Popular Antiquities.” It appears that “on Christmas eve the farmers and their men in Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season.” This salutation consists in “throwing some of the cider about the roots of the tree, placing, bits of the toast on the branches,” and then, “encircling one, of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink the following toast three several times:—

‘Here's to thee, old apple-tree,
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst, blow,
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats-full! caps-full!
Bushel, bushel, sacks-full!
And my pockets full, too! Hurra!’”

Also what was called “apple-howling” used to be practised in various counties of England on New-Year's eve. A troop of boys visited the different orchards, and, encircling the apple-trees, repeated the following words:

"Stand fast, root! bear well, top!
Pray God send us a good howling crop:
Every twig, apples big;
Every bough, apples enow!”

“They then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a cow's horn. During this ceremony they rap the trees with, their sticks.”

This is called “wassailing” the trees, and is thought by some to be a relic of the heathen sacrifice to Pomona.

Herrick sings,—

“Wassaile the trees that they mail beare
You many a plum and many a peare;
For more or less fruits they will bring,
As you so give them wassailing.”

Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine; but it behooves them to sing, better than English Phillips did, else they will do no credit to their Muse.

So much for the more civilized apple trees (urbaniores,as Pliny calls them). I love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted apple-trees, at whatever season of the year,—so irregularly planted; sometimes two trees standing close together; and the rows so devious that you would think that they not only had grown while the owner was sleeping, but had been set out by him in a somnambulic state. The rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these. But I now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent experience, such ravages have been made!

Going up the side of a cliff about the first of November, I saw a vigorous young apple-tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot up amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it, uninjured by the frosts, when all cultivated apples were gathered. It was a rank wild growth, with many green leaves on it still, and made an impression of thorniness. The fruit was hard and green, but looked as if it would be palatable in the winter. Some was dangling, on the twigs, but more half-buried in the wet leaves under the tree, or rolled far down the hill amid the rocks. The owner knows nothing of it. The day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee. There was no dancing, on the green beneath it in its honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its fruit,—which is only gnawed by squirrels, as I perceive. It has done double duty,—not only borne this crop, but each twig has grown a foot into the air. And this is such fruit! bigger than many berries, we must admit, and carried home will be sound and palatable next spring. What care I for Iduna's apples so long as I can get these?

When I go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling fruit, I respect the tree, and I am grateful for Nature's bounty, even though I cannot eat it. Here on this rugged and woody hill-side has grown an apple-tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard, but a natural growth, like the pines and oaks. Most fruits which we prize and use depend entirely on our care. Corn and grain, potatoes, peaches, melons, etc., depend altogether on our planting; but the apple emulates man's independence and enterprise. It is not simply carried, as I have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild and maintain themselves.

Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.

The Crab: Nevertheless, our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock. Wilder still, as I have said, there grows elsewhere in this country a native and aboriginal Crab-Apple, Malus coronaria, “whose nature has not yet been modified by cultivation.” It is found from Western New-York to Minnesota, and southward. Michaux says that its ordinary height “is fifteen or eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet high,” and that the large ones “exactly resemble the common apple-tree.” “The flowers are white mingled with rose-color, and are collected in corymbs.” They are remarkable for their delicious odor. The fruit, according to him, is about an inch and a half in diameter, and is intensely acid. Yet they make fine sweetmeats, and also cider of them. He concludes, that, “if, on being cultivated, it does not yield new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume.”

I never saw the Crab-Apple till May, 1861. I had heard of it through Michaux, but more modern botanists, so far as I know, have not treated it as of any peculiar importance. Thus it was a half-fabulous tree to me. I contemplated a pilgrimage to the “Glades,” a portion of Pennsylvania where it was said to grow to perfection. I thought of sending to a nursery for it, but doubted if they had it, or would distinguish it from European varieties. At last I had occasion to go to Minnesota, and on entering Michigan I began to notice from the cars a tree with handsome rose-colored flowers. At first I thought it some variety of thorn; but it was not long before the truth flashed on me, that this was my long-sought Crab-Apple. It was the prevailing, flowering shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at that season of the year,—about the middle of May. But the cars never stopped before one, and so I was launched on the bosom of the Mississippi without having touched one, experiencing the fate of Tantalus. On arriving at St. Anthony's Falls, I was sorry to be told that I was too far north for the Crab-Apple. Nevertheless I succeeded in finding it about eight miles west of the Falls; touched it and smelled it, and secured a lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. This must have been near its northern limit.

How the Wild Apple Grows: BUT though these are indigenous, like the Indians, I doubt whether they are any hardier than those backwoodsmen among the apple-trees, which, though descended from cultivated stocks, plant themselves in distant fields and forests, where the soil is favorable to them. I know of no trees which have more difficulties to contend with, and which more sturdily resist their foes. These are the ones whose story we have to tell. It oftentimes reads thus:—

Near the beginning of May, we notice little thickets of apple-trees just springing up in the pastures where cattle have been,—as the rocky ones of our Easterbrooks Country, or the top of Nobscot Hill, in Sudbury. One or two of these perhaps survive the drought and other accidents,—their very birthplace defending them against the encroaching grass and some other dangers, at first.

In two years' time 't had thus
Reached the level of the rocks,
Admired the, stretching world,
Nor feared the wandering flocks.
But at this tender age
Its sufferings began:
There came a browsing ox
And cut it down a span.

This time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid the grass; but the next year, when it has grown more stout, he recognizes, it for a fellow-emigrant from the old country, the flavor of whose leaves and twigs he well knows; and though at first he pauses to welcome it, and express his surprise, and gets for answer, “The same cause that brought you here brought me,” he nevertheless browses it again, reflecting, it may be, that he has some title to it.

Thus cut down annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock.

Some of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that I have ever seen, as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches as of their thorns, have been these wild-apple scrubs. They are more like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand, and sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they contend with, than anything else. No wonder they are prompted to grow thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes. In their thorniness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid.

The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred to—for they maintain their ground best in a rocky field—are thickly sprinkled with these little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up between them, with the seed still attached to them.

Being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form, from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by the gardener's art. In the pastures on Nobscot Hill and its spurs, they make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. They are also an excellent covert from hawks for many small birds that roost and build in them. Whole flocks perch in them at night, and I have seen three robins' nests in one which was six feet in diameter.

No doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the day they were planted, but infants still when you consider their development and the long life before them. I counted the annual rings of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty! They were so low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of their contemporaries from the nurseries were already bearing considerable crops. But what you gain in time is perhaps in this case, too, lost in power,—that is, in the vigor of the tree. This is their pyramidal state.

The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph.

Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now, if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its repressed energy to these upright parts. In a short time these become a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. The spreading bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse the seed.

Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.

It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should trim young apple-trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes. The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the right height, I think.

In spite of wandering kine, and other adverse circumstances, that despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter from hawks, has its blossom-week at last, and in course of time its harvest, sincere, though small.

By the end of some October, when its leaves have fallen, I frequently see such a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I thought it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and I make haste to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more and more memorable varieties than both of them.

Through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit! Though somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that which has grown in a garden,—will perchance be all the sweeter and more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with. Who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on some remote and rocky hill-side, where it is as yet unobserved by man, may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,—at least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter and the Baldwin grew.

Every wild-apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men.

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.

This is one, and the most remarkable way, in which the wild apple is propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and swamps, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows with comparative rapidity. Those which grow in dense woods are very tall and slender. I frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly mild and tamed fruit. As Palladius says, “Et injussu consternitur ubere mali” : And the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden apple-tree.

It is an old notion, that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to posterity the most highly prized qualities of others. However, I am not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust has suffered no “inteneration.” It is not my highest plot

To plant the Bergamot. The Fruit, and its Flavor:  The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of November. They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still perhaps as beautiful as ever. I make a great account of these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to gather,—wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken, unless he has a walker's appetite and imagination, neither of which can he have.

Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November, I presume that the owner does not mean to gather. They belong to children as wild as themselves,—to certain active boys that I know—to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who gleans after all the world,—and, moreover, to us walkers. We have met with them, and they are ours. These rights, long enough insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries, where they have learned how to live. I hear that “the custom of grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, practiced in Herefordshire. It consists in leaving a few apples, which are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering, for the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them.”

As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this quarter of the earth,—fruit of old trees that have been dying ever since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn with spirited fruit,—some of it, perhaps, collected at squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried them,—some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and some, especially in damp days, a shelless snail. The very sticks and stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past years.

I have seen no account of these among the “Fruits and Fruit-Trees of America,” though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess, when October and November, when December and January, and perhaps February and March even, have assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that “they have a kind of bow-arrow tang.”

Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and bearing qualities,—not so much for their beauty, as for their fairness and soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen. Their “Favorites” and “None-suches” and “Seek-no-farthers,” when I have fruited them, commonly turn out very tame and forgetable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest, and have no real tang nor smackto them.

What if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine verjuice, do they not still belong to the Pomaceæ, which are uniformly innocent and kind to our race? I still begrudge them to the cider-mill.

Perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet.

No wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make the best cider. Loudon quotes from the “Herefordshire Report,” that “apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be preferred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the weakest and most watery juice.” And he says, that, “to prove this, Dr. Symonds, of Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor, while the latter was sweet and insipid.”

Evelyn says that the “Red-strake” was the favorite cider-apple in his day and he quotes one Dr. Newburg as saying, “In Jersey 't is a general observation, as I hear, that the more of red any apple has in its rind, the more proper it is for this use. Pale-faced apples they exclude as much as may be from their cider-vat.” This opinion still prevails.

All apples are good in November. Those which the farmer leaves out as unsalable, and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets, are choicest fruit to the walker. But it is remarkable that the wild apple, which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste. The Saunterer's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. The palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and demands a tamed one; for there you miss the November air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with. Accordingly, when Tityrus, seeing the lengthening shadows, invites Meliboeus to go home and pass the night with him, he promises him mild apples and soft chestnuts,—mitia poma, castaneœ molles. I frequently pluck wild apples of so rich and spicy a flavor that I wonder all orchardists do not get a scion from that tree, and I fail not to bring home my pockets full. But perchance, when I take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber, I find it unexpectedly crude,—sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream.

These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and stingand permeate us with their spirit. They must be eaten in season, accordingly,—that is, out-of-doors.

To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. The out-door air and exercise which the walker gets give a different tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining leaves, and the jay, is heard screaming around. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”

Of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the taste that is up to them. Some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps one-half of them must be eaten in the house, the other out-doors. One Peter Whitney wrote from Northborough in 1t782, for the Proceedings of the Boston Academy, describing an apple-tree in that town “producing fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple being frequently sour and the other sweet”; also some all sour, and others all sweet, and this diversity on all parts of the tree.

There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town which has to me a peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and relish it. I hear that the fruit of a kind of plumtree in Provence is “called Prunes sibarelles, because it is impossible to whistle after having eaten them, from their sourness.” But perhaps they were only eaten in the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and clearer?

In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated; just as the wood-chopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there and dreams of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would make a student miserable. They who are at work abroad are not cold, but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. As with temperatures, so with flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour and sweet. This natural raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased palate refuses, are the true condiments.

Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses, papillae firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily flattened and tamed.

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an out-door man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!

Nor is it every apple I desire,
Nor that which pleases every palate best;
'T is not the lasting Deuxan I require,
Nor yet the red-checked Greening I request
Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife,
Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife:
No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life!

So there is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable, if tasted in the house.

Their Beauty: Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere. It will have some red stains, commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of Nature,—green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a milder flavor,—yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,—apples not of Discord, but of Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share. Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the influence of the sun on all sides alike,—some with the faintest pink blush imaginable,—some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running, regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a straw-colored ground,—some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less confluent and fiery when wet,—and others gnarly, and freckled or peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints the autumn leaves. Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,—apple of the Hesperides, apple of the evening sky! But like shells and pebbles on the sea-shore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the house.

The Naming of Them: It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider mill. Would it not tax a man's invention,—no one to be named after a man, and all in the lingua vernacula? 

Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the lingua vernacula flag. We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveller and the truant boy, to our aid.



In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our Crab might yield to cultivation.

Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all, to give the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live where English is not spoken,—for they are likely to have a world-wide reputation.

There is, first of all, the Wood-Apple (Malus sylvatica); the Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods, (sylvestrivallis) also in Hollows in Pastures (campestrivallis); the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (Malus cellaris); the Meadow-Apple; the Partridge-Apple; the Truant's Apple, (Cessatoris,) which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however late it may be; the Saunterer's Apple,—you must lose yourself before you can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (Decus Aëris); December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed, (gelato-soluta,) good only in that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the Musketaquidensis; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England; the Chickaree Apple ; the Green Apple (Malus viridis);—this has many synonymes; in an imperfect state, it is theCholera morbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis dilectissima;—the Apple which Atalanta stopped to pick up; the Hedge Apple (Malus Sepium); the Slug-Apple (limacea); the Railroad-Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue,—Pedestrium Solatium; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many more I have on my list, too numerous to mention,—all of them good. As Bodaeus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodaeus,—

Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these wild apples.

The Last Gleaning: By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. The note of the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half-closed and tearful. But still, if you are a skilful gleaner, you may get many a pocket-full even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone out-of-doors. I know a Blue-Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of a swamp, almost as good as wild. You would not suppose that there was any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you must look according to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes, I explore amid the bare alders and the huckleberry-bushes and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying, ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself,—a proper kind of packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets and perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it, (as Curzon an old manuscript from a monastery's mouldy cellar,) but still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to yield anything, I have learned to look between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance.

I learn from Topsell's Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus, that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries home his apples. He says,—“His meat is apples, worms, or grapes: when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth; and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until they be all settled upon his back again. So, forth he goeth, making a noise like a cart-wheel; and if he have any young ones in his nest, they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come.”

The “Frozen-Thawed” Apple: Toward the end of November, though some of the sound ones are yet more mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves, lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is finger-cold, and prudent farmers get in their barrelled apples, and bring you the apples and cider which they have engaged; for it is time to put them into the cellar. Perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheecks above the early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and soundness under the snow throughout the winter. But generally at the beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed, acquire the color of a baked apple.

Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have more substance, are a sweet and luscious food,—in my opinion of more worth than the pine-apples which are imported from the West Indies. Those which lately even I tasted only to repent of it,—for I am semi-civilized,—which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I am now glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the young oaks. It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. Let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang. Or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. But after the third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good.

What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid South, to this fruit matured by the cold of the frigid North? These are those crabbed apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets with them,—bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the overflowing juice,—and grow more social with their wine. Was there one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our sticks could not dislodge it?

It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,—quite distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and cider,—and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection.

* * *
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.

You may still wander through old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side, and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider. Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no native apple-trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see nobody planting trees to-day in such out-of-the-way places, along the lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood.

Now that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in,—and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.

Henry David Thoreau was an essayist, a poet, and a philosopher.

Let's write about the very first photograph: A Paris notecard

The First Candid

In 1838, Louis Daguerre snapped a photo of a Parisian street, empty but for a shoeshine boy and his client. Now that some sleuths have zeroed in on the location, the city is marking it with a plaque.

Published in The New Yorker by Lauren Collins.

Before portrait photographer August Sander (1876-1964), and Diane Arbus and Olan Mills, before Facetune and duck face, there were two: a shoeshine boy and his client, captured by Louis Daguerre on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, 1838, in what is thought to be the first photograph to depict human beings. The bootblack squats beside a chest containing the tools of his trade. The patron stands, hands clasped behind his back, with a foot perched on the box. We know it’s spring, because the leaves are coming in on the plane trees. The two were hardly the only people out that day on the bustling stretch of cabarets. But they were the only people who held still long enough to be captured by Daguerre’s curious new machine, which required an exposure time of up to ten minutes. The next year, presenting the daguerreotype to the Assemblée Nationale, the physicist François Arago noted, “In this genre, it’s the unforeseen that one must count upon.” Soon, the French state would buy the rights to the invention and offer it as a free gift “to the world.” The names of the boy and his client were never recorded, but they live on as the accidental embodiment of photography on the brink of conquering the world.

One night in 2024, Maximilien Van Aertryck went out for drinks with his colleagues Axel Danielson and Kalle Boman. Van Aertryck is a producer who works with the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund and has co-directed a documentary about the history of image-making. In other words, he knows a lot about photography. He had always loved the Daguerre picture: “It’s so poetic, with those two lonely people on that huge frame.” As he and his friends drifted out of the café, they crossed the Boulevard du Temple. It was June. The trees were nearing lushness. “We were, like, ‘Wait a minute! It must have been taken somewhere around here!,’ ” Van Aertryck recalled, visiting the area the other day. They punched a few keywords into Google, and found some articles, “in pretty big newspapers,” surmising that the photograph might have been snapped near the Filles du Calvaire Métro stop. “We knew immediately that there was no way it was there,” Van Aertryck said. “If you look at the photo, it just doesn’t make sense. So we went home and went to bed, promising that we’d meet at the same place at eight the next morning, and we’d figure this out.”

Thus began an eighteen-month quest to pinpoint the exact location of the shot, involving everything from archival research to drones to very long measuring tapes. It wasn’t easy. For one thing, Baron Haussmann had demolished swaths of the neighborhood in the mid-eighteen-hundreds to create the Place de la République. Van Aertryck and his colleagues turned to prints, paintings, real-estate registers, and topographical maps to re-create Daguerre’s environs, but these pre-photographic renderings had their limits. “We kept just finding engravings of one particular building, because some emperor got shot there,” Van Aertryck recalled. Both Daguerre’s workshop, on what is now Rue Léon-Jouhaux, and a theatre that he owned, called the Diorama, burned in 1839. “No one, not even the biggest nerds who have researched this,” can agree on where, exactly, Daguerre took the photograph, Van Aertryck said, but he and his team were able to determine that three buildings from the era are still standing today. They brought their findings to an architectural firm, which used a 3-D scan of the entire square to triangulate the shoe-shiner’s location. Another architectural firm, using the same data, homed in on a point just a few feet away. “We decided to split the difference,” Van Aertryck explained, scuffing his shoe over a red “X” that had been painted on one of the paving stones, not far from some wads of gum. “A colleague ran out to buy nail polish to mark the spot!” he explained.

For nearly a century, the Bavarian National Museum, in Munich, possessed a photographic plate of the image, which Daguerre had sent to King Ludwig I, but it was badly damaged by restoration efforts during the Second World War—the only remaining physical trace of “Boulevard du Temple” is a photo of the photo that the MoMA curator Beaumont Newhall took in the nineteen-thirties. On October 15th, however, the City of Paris will unveil a plaque commemorating the shoeshine pair—an “unforeseen” detail, the world’s first photographic portrait sitters and the original photobombers at the same time. “I hope people will make it theirs and embrace it as the starting point for something,” Van Aertryck said. May it spawn a million selfies.😂😁😋😌