I kept thinking about race as we walked along Taylor Street in what’s left of Chicago’s Little Italy. Where Italian businesses once stood, LA Tan, Yummy Thai, CousCous and an Irish bar, Drum & Monkey, now … Read more
The search for the Ghigliones, what I like to think of as a representative immigrant family from Mark Twain’s era, began for me in St. Louis. There I discovered two branches of the local Ghigliones, the … Read more
In 1996 Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor of the Oxford Mark Twain and author of Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, wrote a skeptic’s critique of Hannibal and its Mark Twain Boyhood … Read more
Think of Captain Steve Terry, the 52-year-old pilot-owner of the Mark Twain Riverboat, as a 21st-century Twain. Terry, as did Twain, loves life on the Mississippi. He earned his license at age 19, becoming the youngest … Read more
I managed to resist much of Hannibal’s historic-site hucksterism—the souvenir Mark Twain t-shirts and the ride on the Too-Too Twain. But I succumbed to the Mark Twain Dinette’s 12-foot-tall rotating mug of root beer atop a … Read more
Loren Ghiglione (b. April 5, 1941) was president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (1989-1990) during his 26 years (1969-1995) as editor-publisher-owner of the Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News. He then consulted to The Newseum (1995-96), directed journalism program at Emory (1996-99), USC (1999-2001) and Northwestern (2001-06), and served as president of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication (2006-07). He has written or edited eight books about journalism and teaches global journalism and media history at Northwestern.
