A Northwestern University journalism student, professor and 2011 graduate are driving 13,500 miles around the United States between Sept. 18 and Dec. 11 for a project titled “Traveling with Twain in Search of America’s Identity.” The three will follow the path that a young Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) took by stagecoach, steamship and train during trips east to New York, south to New Orleans and west to San Francisco during the 1850s and 1860s; they will interview a variety of Americans about race, immigration-status and other current identity issues and talk with members of a representative American family, the Ghigliones, that first immigrated to the United States from northern Italy in the 1870s. Read more >>
Andrew Walsh, associate director of Trinity College’s Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and a former Hartford Courant reporter, is an expert on Hartford immigration. He kindly took us around … Read more
Craig Hotchkiss is the Education Program Manager at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Conn. In this video, Hotchkiss addresses some of the topics we’ve been dealing with, including race and sexual orientation, as … Read more
You’ve probably noticed that this video is six minutes long. So far, I’ve been making an effort to keep the videos I upload brief, sometimes (read: most times) under a minute. That’s, of course, a response … Read more
As his 40th birthday approached, Mark Twain joined walking buddy Rev. Joe Twichell on a hundred-mile hike from Hartford to Boston. They walked 35 miles to North Ashford, Conn., before Twain’s aching knee joints and the … Read more
When Mark Twain visited Yale in 1885 to lecture, Warner T. McGuinn, one of the first African-American students at Yale Law School, served as his campus guide and introduced him at a public meeting. Impressed by … Read more
