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 >>
In 1885-86, James F. Gluck, a young attorney in Buffalo, N.Y., received from Mark Twain half of the manuscript of his recently published novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Gluck was collecting letters and manuscripts by important … Read more
On our first night in Elmira, Ny., we stayed at a bed and breakfast called the Painted Lady. The rooms were Twain-themed because Samuel Clemens had spent a significant portion of his life in Elmira, where … Read more
Elmira, Ny.—a rust-belt railroad and manufacturing town of 29,200 that has lost 40 percent of its population since 1950—promotes itself as Mark Twain Country. Home to Twain’s burial site and the Quarry Farm study where he … Read more
Villified today by some as America’s enemies, immigrants and refugees actually may be saviors of the nation’s disintegrating cities. The Rust Belt cities of Cleveland, Ohio, and Buffalo, Ny., among the poorest in America, have in … Read more
New York State Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Catholic, agonized about his vote on legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. In the end, as the video indicates, he decided the denial of rights to same-sex partners … Read more
