09/04/2026
September 3 is the date in 1838 that Frederick Douglass, disguised as a sailor, boarded a train to escape from enslavement. He went on to become a tireless advocate for abolition, as well as for women’s suffrage; in 1848, Douglass was one of the original signatories of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments.” “I love that religion,” he wrote, “which sends its votaries to bind up the wounds of those who have fallen among thieves.” And again: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened around his own neck.”
September 3 is also the birthday of anthropologist, naturalist, and author Loren Eiseley, born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1907. In poetic, evocative prose, he wrote a series of books that inspired a generation of nature writers, including The Immense Journey (1957), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and The Star Thrower (1979). His essay, “How Flowers Changed the World,” is a little masterpiece, and a classic example of Eiseley’s knack for evoking creation’s wonder: "The fantastic seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys brought with them an amazing adaptability. If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world changed into something that glowed here and there with strange colors, put out q***r, unheard of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leaf-crunching days of the dinosaurs…"
