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Harriett Mulford Stone Lothrop (June 22, 1844 - August 2, 1924; born 'Harriett Stone') was an American children's author who published under the pseudonym Margaret Sidney. She is most famous for her Five Little Peppers series, but her most enduring legacy was founding the National Society of the Children of the American Revolution. Lothrop was also active in historic preservation around Concord, Massachusetts.

Life
Harriett Lothrop was born Harriett Stone on June 22, 1844 in New Haven, Connecticut. She was the daughter of architect Sidney Mason Stone, whose first name she later included in her pseudonym, Margaret Sidney.

Harriett Lothrop married her publisher, Daniel Lothrop, in 1881. Her husband died in 1892, and Harriett ran the D. Lothrop Publishing Company for two years until it was sold. It then became the Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company.

She died in San Francisco on August 2, 1924. She was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord.

Children of the American Revolution
Harriett Lothrop founded the National Society of the Children of the American Revolution (N.S.C.A.R.). Lothrop had a great appreciation for history and was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). During the 1895 DAR Continental Congress (annual national meeting), Lothrop called on her fellow DAR members to create a patriotic organization for their children. The DAR Continental Congress approved of Lothrop's plan, and the Children of the American Revolution was created on April 5, 1895.

Lothrop served as the National President of the N.S.C.A.R. for its first six years. The Society is still active and is the oldest patriotic organization for youth in the United States. Its mission is to train good citizens, develop leaders and promote love of the United States of America and its heritage among young people.

Work
Harriett Lothrop was not published until the late 1870s, when she began submitting short stories to Wide Awake, a children's magazine published by Daniel Lothrop. "Polly Pepper's Chicken Pie" was accepted by the magazine, and after the subsequent publication of "Phronsie Pepper's New Shoes" the publisher asked for a twelve story serial about the Peppers. This series was later published in book form as The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.

Novels: Five Little Peppers Series

 * Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881)
 * Five Little Peppers Midway (1890)
 * Five Little Peppers Grown Up (1892)
 * Phronsie Pepper (1897)
 * Stories Polly Pepper Told (1899)
 * The Adventures of Joel Pepper (1900)
 * Five Little Peppers Abroad (1902)
 * Five Little Peppers at School (1903)
 * Five Little Peppers and their Friends (1904)
 * Ben Pepper (1905)
 * Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House (1907)
 * Our Davie Pepper (1916)

Other Works

 * The Little Red Shop (1880)
 * Tressy's Christmas (1880)
 * Half year at Bronckton (1881)
 * So as by Fire (1881)
 * What the Seven Did (1883)
 * How they went to Europe (1884)
 * Who Told it to Me (1884)
 * The Pettibone Name (1885)
 * Ringing Words, and Other Sketches (1885)
 * The golden West : As seen by the Ridgway Club (1886)
 * Hester and other New England Stories (1886)
 * A New Departure for Girls (1886)
 * On Easter Day (1886)
 * Two Modern Little Princes and Other Stories (1886)
 * Dilly and the Captain (1887)
 * How Tom and Dorothy Made and Kept a Christian Home (1888)
 * St. George and the Dragon, a Story of Boy Life, and Kensington Junior (1888)
 * Our town, dedicated to all members of the Y. P. S. C. E. (1889)
 * An Adirondack cabin; a family story telling of journeyings by lake and mountain, and idyllic days in the heart of the wilderness (1890)
 * Rob: a Story for Boys (1891)
 * The Kaleidoscope (1892)
 * Little Paul and the Frisbie School (1893)
 * Whittier with the Children (1893)
 * The Old Town Pump, a Story of East and West (1895)
 * The Gingham Bag, the Tale of an Heirloom (1896)
 * Little Maid of Concord Town; a Romance of the American Revolution (1898)
 * Old Concord: Her Highways and Byways (1898)
 * The Judges' Cave; Being a Romance of the New Haven Colony in the Days of the Regicides, 1661 (1900)
 * Sally, Mrs. Tubbs (1903)
 * Two little friends in Norway (1906)
 * Little Maid of Boston (1910)

Short Stories
"Those Souvenir Spoons: A Story," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, (September 1892)

Uncategorized

 * Ballad of the lost hare (1882)
 * The Minute Man a Ballad of "The Shot Heard Round the World" (1886)
 * Lullabies and jingles (1893)

Online texts
Novels
 * Five Little Peppers and How They Grew - Project Gutenberg
 * Five Little Peppers Midway - Project Gutenberg
 * Five Little Peppers Grown Up - Project Gutenberg
 * The Adventures of Joel Pepper - Project Gutenberg
 * Five Little Peppers Abroad - Project Gutenberg
 * Five Little Peppers and their Friends - Project Gutenberg

Short Stories and Poems
 * The Ballad of the Lost Hare - Library of Congress
 * "Those Souvenir Spoons: A Story," from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, September 1892 - Cornell Library
 * "Corinne's Musicale" (poem) and "Caryl's Plum" (short story) from Twilight Stories 1905 - Project Gutenberg

Life and work
He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1837. There are legends stating Thoreau did not want to pay the five dollar fee required from Harvard College to receive a college diploma or a “sheet of paper;” therefore, he never received it. This is untrue and what actually happened was Harvard College offered a master of arts degree to anyone of its graduates “who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college.” (Thoreau's Diploma)

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years, he accepted the ideas of Transcendentalism, an eclectic philosophy that included among its advocates Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott.

After college, Thoreau taught school, wrote essays and poems for The Dial, and briefly attempted freelance writing in New York City. The death of his brother in 1842 was a profound emotional shock and may have influenced his decision to live with his parents and never to marry.

Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845 when he moved to a second-growth forest around the shores of beautiful Walden Pond, not far from his friends and family in Concord. He left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847 to live with his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emerson's family in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau refused to pay taxes in 1846, based on his opposition to the Mexican War, and was later jailed (Abraham Lincoln and he were the only noted Americans who opposed this war). He described this event in his popular essay 'Civil Disobedience', which influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr..

Published in 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods recounts the two years and two months Thoreau spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, this American classic emerged from a nine year process of composition and revision, the lengthy period in part because his previous work, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, had been so poorly received.

At various times, Thoreau earned a living by lecturing or working at his family's pencil factory. He invented a machine that simplified production while cutting costs. Later he converted the factory to producing plumbago, used to ink typesetting machines. Frequent contact with minute particles of lead may have weakened his lungs.

After 1850 he became a land surveyor, "travelling a good deal in Concord," and writing natural history observations about the 26 mile&sup2; (67 km&sup2;) township in his Journal, a two million word document that he kept for 24 years. He also traveled to Canada, Cape Cod, and Maine, landscapes that inspired his "excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel intineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history, and philosophy.



Hailed as the first European-American environmentalist, Thoreau wrote essays on autumnal foliage, the succession of forest trees, and the disperal of seeds, collected in Excursions. Scientists regard these works as anticipating ecology, the study of interactions between species, places, and seasons. He was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. Thoreau was also one of the first American supporters of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Thoreau was not without his critics. In his lifetime, he was praised by the English novelist George Eliot who wrote in the Westminster Review, "People—very wise in their own eyes— who would have every man's life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility  of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy."

Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was one of those scoffers, with a sexist twist: "...Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences."

Many of these attitudes began to change after publication in 1906 of the Journal, which revealed the vast extent of Thoreau's writings and ideas. Today he is regarded as a foremost American writer, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics.

Thoreau died of tuberculosis in the town of his birth, Concord. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord.

Quotations

 * "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges." (Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, Owen Thomas, ed. (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1966), p. 197).


 * "Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame."


 * "To be awake is to be alive, and I have not yet met a man who was quite awake."


 * "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." &mdash;Walden, 1854


 * "No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth." &mdash;Walden, 1854


 * "The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise." &mdash;Walden, 1854

Online texts

 * Autumnal Tints - courtesy of Wikisource.
 * Cape Cod - Thoreau Reader
 * On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
 * ] who wrote in the Westminster Review, "People—very wise in their own eyes— who would have every man's life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility  of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy."

Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was one of those scoffers, with a sexist twist: "...Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences."

Many of these attitudes began to change after publication in 1906 of the Journal, which revealed the vast extent of Thoreau's writings and ideas. Today he is regarded as a foremost American writer, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics.

Thoreau died of tuberculosis in the town of his birth, Concord. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord.

Quotations

 * "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges." (Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, Owen Thomas, ed. (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1966), p. 197).


 * "Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame."


 * "To be awake is to be alive, and I have not yet met a man who was quite awake."


 * "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away