Traveling with Twain

In Search of America's Identity

Posts by Loren Ghiglione (view all)

Mexican American artist Andy Valdivia depicts overcoming violence, poverty and “Mexican Heaven”

Shortly after my Haskin grandparents left Kansas by railroad, Mexican immigrants began arriving in Kansas by railroad to escape poverty and the violence of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. They took unskilled jobs with railroads, mining companies … Read more >>

Warden Burl Cain of Louisiana State Penitentiary advocates “moral rehabilitation”

Burl Cain, 69, warden of Louisiana State Penitentiary for about 17 years, arranges for us to view the 18,000-acre prison, the largest maximum security penitentiary in America, from its Mississippi River edge. That’s the way Samuel … Read more >>

Small river towns of Keokuk, IA, and Cape Girardeau, MO, showcase Twain’s writings and letters

On the drive to Keokuk, Iowa, where a young Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) worked as a printer in the mid-1850s, we stop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, for lunch. We have Twain as an appetizer. A building … Read more >>

Money, Mississippi: A beginning place for the civil rights revolution

We have stopped at what remains of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, Money, Mississippi, site of an incident that led to a brutal murder that helped kick-start the civil rights revolution. On August 14, 1955, Emmett … Read more >>

Ernest Withers: Civil rights photographer and FBI informant?

I remember Ernest Withers of Memphis as a distinguished civil rights photographer, whose message to journalism students at Emory and Northwestern Universities, when I invited him to speak, was more spiritual than shutter-speed, f-stop practical. Shortly … Read more >>