In 1834, Ralph Waldo Emerson, lecturer and essayist, moved to Concord, Massachusetts. The following year he bought a home in the town of 2000 residents, where he remained for all his remaining days, with his wife Lidian and their children.

     Concord lies thirty-three miles north and west of Boston. Small town life suited Emerson. 

     The town’s claim to fame is that on April 19, 1775, its local farmers took up arms to defy red-coated British soldiers dispatched from Boston to Concord to seize arms. The pitched battles at first Lexington and then Concord were the first major battles of the American Revolution. 

     For the Independence Day celebration in 1837, Concord’s Battle Monument Committee asked Emerson to write a hymn for the dedication of an obelisk monument at the site of the Old North Bridge where the battle at Concord was fought sixty-two years before.

     Emerson obliged and wrote, “Concord Hymn.” He composed sixteen lines, divided into four stanzas of four lines each. The first stanza included one of his most memorable sentences.

    “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, / Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.”

     Indeed, it was Concord’s farmers who first dared to defy King George III and his red-coated soldiers. They dared to take up arms against a king. They dared to initiate an insurrection. The news of their daring defiance traveled throughout the world. 

     Emerson did not attend Concord’s July 4 celebration in 1837, because he had reason to be in Plymouth. If he had attended, he would have heard his hymn sung by a Concord choir.

     Also, Emerson would have heard the Honorable Congressman Samuel Hoar give a speech. Yet, “the exact duration and full text of Hoar’s speech that day has been lost to history.”

     This week, on June 2, 2026, publishers will release a new book, “The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776.” Its author, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, is professor of history at the University of Southern California.

     Years ago, Perl-Rosenthal set upon a monumental research task. He searched for, found, and read 2500 of the extant July 4 celebration speeches given, out of more than 100,000, over the next century. He noted the changes in attitudes, as that century unfolded.

     There were those who spoke up because they did not share in the ideals that Jefferson stated in the Declaration: women, slaves, freed blacks, and Native Americans. Others spoke up and insisted that Americans are those who are born on American soil or who migrated here.

     It is common for human beings to believe that a given circumstance is inevitable. For example, for centuries kings insisted they had a divine right to rule over a land and its people. 

     Thomas Paine disagreed. In “Common Sense,” published in January 1776, Paine wrote, 

     “A French [guy] landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.” Rid your thoughts of divine right, and a path to independence opens.

     In late June of 1776, Thomas Jefferson picked up a quill pen and wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

     The biographer, Walter Isaacson, has declared that sentence perhaps the greatest ever written.        

     People read Jefferson’s sentence and clamored to get to America, where they could live a new life, one blessed with rights and liberty, where they could pursue joy and happiness.

Take a break from the present, and consider the better books from the past.

Of all the books published since the days of the ancients, I consider five most useful: Fibonacci’s “Liber Abaci,” Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica,” Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species,” the “King James Bible,” and William Shakespeare’s plays.

Each added to the world’s body of knowledge an immeasurable amount that affects our modern lives, even yet today.

Leonard de Pisa, or aka “Fibonacci,” was born in Italy in 1170. His father, a customs agent, took Leonardo to Algiers, and there in school he learned the common people’s math skills.

In 1202, he published his book, “Liber Abaci,” and in it he introduced the Hindu-Arabic numeral system of 0 to 9, suggesting that it was superior to Europe’s Roman numerals. He also described methods for converting currencies, for calculating interest, and using fractions.

Everyday, you and I rely upon Fibonacci’s ideas and math tricks.

Isaac Newton—an Englishman, scientist, and mathematician—published his “Principia Mathematica,” on July 5, 1687. Written in Latin, it introduced to the world laws of motion and gravitation. By them, Newton showed how planets and comets cycle through space.

A foundation for modern physics and astronomy, Newton’s book “is considered one of the most important scientific books ever written.” NASA’s Artemis Mission relied upon his book.

Charles Darwin—also an Englishmen, and a scientist—published his “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection,” November 24, 1859. It unified the biological sciences into a single working theory. Darwin’s last sentence says much.

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

A total of 47 English scholars worked for seven years, 1604 to 1611, on the King James translation of the Bible. Each company of scholars were tasked to translate sections of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, from Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic into English.

The King James Bible has endured ever since, because of its “majestic literary style,” its “linguistic beauty,” its “imagery.” If anyone wants to read poetry, turn to the Psalms. If anyone wants to read great stories, turn to Genesis. For spiritual sustenance, read the entire book.

Two English actors from London, John Heminges and Henry Condell, made a diligent search and collected 36 of Shakespeare’s plays and published them under the title, “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, Published According to the Original Copies.”

The year was 1623. Their book is now called the “First Folio.” Some 750 copies were printed, but only 235 are known to exist, and of those, 82 are in the Folger Library in Washington D.C.

Heminges and Condell’s gift to the world occurred 7 years after Shakespeare’s passing at the age of 52 years, on April 23, 1616. He was born the same day, April 23, 1564.

Yes, his words are difficult for readers to understand, and yet within his plays, he explored “universal human emotions, like love, ambition, grief, and jealousy.” He “tackled enduring themes, like tyranny, power, and inequality.” For insights into humanity, read Shakespeare.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “If we tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge.”

Fibonacci, Newton, Darwin, the English Bible, and Shakespeare, I and others consider their works useful. Take a break from the present, and read them, or read about them.

Jeffrey W. Kitchen has taught an intense course on screenwriting to a series of small groups of just six people over the past 35 years. In recent weeks, I came across Kitchen on YouTube, and I was impressed by his skill, that of a classical dramatist.

Kitchen says, “What I teach is plot construction and dramatic principle—the craft of the dramatist, the ancient art of adapting a story for a theatrical presentation, whether in film, on TV, or onstage. It’s about making a story actable so that it will grip an audience.”

He dares to say that Hollywood producers reject 90 to 95% of all screenplays submitted, as unreadable or un-actable. Others say that the percentage of rejects is closer to 98%.

I would suggest that those movies that Hollywood produces, the 2% that make the cut, most are poor to fair. It is rare to see a good movie. I wonder, What makes a good movie?

Kitchen answers by pointing his students back to Aristotle, who lived 2400 years ago in ancient Athens. In Aristotle’s book “Poetics,” he noticed that the better plays, those that thrilled audiences, included at least five elements: Dilemma, Crisis, Decision, Action, and Resolution.

A complication arises, a knot of events occurs that reaches a crisis and then unravels toward a resolution. The play is a unified whole, a series of interconnected actions, not random events.

In addition, Kitchen rediscovered William Thompson Price, a pioneer in American drama, an early authority on play construction. Price wrote at least two books, “The Technique of the Drama,” (1892), and “The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle,” (1908).

It was Aristotle, “who searched out the first group of basic principles” but it was “Mr. Price two thousand years and more afterward who was to enlarge, correlate, and define them.”

For years Price taught playwriting in New York City, and edited scripts for producers. “He defined drama as a cohesive, coherent, and compelling series of events that engage an audience’s interest and engenders feelings of suspense throughout the performance.”

Kitchen teaches both Aristotle and Price’s classical techniques. Above all else, he emphasizes the first of Aristotle’s five elements: dilemma.

Dilemma is a Greek word, meaning “a situation requiring a choice between two equally undesirable alternatives,” or a “double premise,” or a “horned argument.” Often both of the dilemma’s two horns conflict with moral principles, and neither option is acceptable.

For example, consider individual rights vs. those of a community, national security vs. men and women’s freedoms, speaking truth to a king who insists upon loyalty, choosing adventure rather than security, or leaving a bad marriage to suffer in a void of loneliness.

In “Training Day,” Denzil Washington plays the role of Detective Alonzo Harris of the LAPD, who introduces Officer Jake Hoyt, played by Ethan Hawke, to the unpolished methods needed, as an undercover cop, to nab criminals in the worst parts of the city, over a single day.

Hoyt is appalled to learn of Harris’s outrageous corruption, his criminality, his use of raw force, his unchecked ambition, and yet Hoyt needs this job. He cannot quit. Harris forces Hoyt to become a criminal to catch criminals. Hoyt choses adventure over security, but should he?

Kitchen writes, “The more powerful the dilemma is, the more powerful the script will be. There is no hiding from a compelling dilemma, no pretending that it is not happening.”

I agree that dilemma within a script is required, but often scriptwriters drench their scripts with unnecessary violence that make them, for me, unwatchable. Scriptwriting is a complex literary exercise, but the final product is entertainment, not as profound as a history or an essay.