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 >>
The Saturday morning we went to see journalism professor Ed Alwood at Quinnipiac University, it happened to be parents’ weekend and the campus was abuzz with activity—music playing, lots of hand-drawn cardboard signs, mothers and fathers … Read more
I, like other Ghigliones born in the United States, returned to Pontedecimo, Italy, birthplace of my great-grandfather, Angelo Francesco Ghiglione, in search of the holy grail. Our holy grail took the form of descendants—any descendants—of Angelo … Read more
Larry Mass invited us to his Manhattan apartment to discuss the sense of wistfulness that the gay community feels as it becomes more and more assimilated in society. Mass, co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, … Read more
Ellis Cose is a renowned American journalist whose most recent book The End of Anger: A New Generation’s Take on Race and Rage was published May 2011. We interviewed him in his writing apartment in Manhattan. … Read more
We met with Michael Kupperman in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on a windy New York day. Kupperman is an American cartoonist and humorist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker. His most recent book Mark Twain’s … Read more
