Traveling with Twain

Blame it on the music madness of Memphis—see Dan Tham’s videos of the marching-to-music ducks at the Peabody Hotel below—but a visit to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s mansion, has me thinking that Mark Twain and Elvis the … Read more >>

A half-century has passed since Dwania Kyles, a wellness consultant in New York, made history as one of the Memphis 13, first-graders who desegregated the all-white public schools of Memphis. She has returned to Memphis for … Read more >>

The parents of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) moved with slaves to Missouri, where he was born, from Tennessee, where he was conceived. So we sought a Tennessee location where we could experience the life and death … Read more >>

While Mark Twain never visited or lived in Jamestown, Tennessee, the town makes the most of its claim that Mark Twain was conceived somewhere, sometime within its borders. Skidmore Garrett, attorney and owner of the Mark … Read more >>

An African-American born in Cleveland who “grew up in the ‘hood,” Ihsan Bagby says he had rejected Christianity by his junior year in high school. “I thought I had rejected God,” he adds, but in 1969, … Read more >>