Hal Holbrook tells us to visit Jackass Hill
Actor Hal Holbrook, 86, has been playing Mark Twain for 57 years, a decade longer than Samuel Clemens wrote as Mark Twain. In the first week of our Twain trip we drove 1,325 miles (almost 500 … Read more
About the Trip
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 >>
Follow the Trip
Attorney and amateur historian examines Hannibal’s slaveholding past
Hannibal, Mo., cheerily announces its intentions before you reach the downtown area. “America’s Hometown.” It’s written on a stout, sky-blue water tower that looms over Highway 61, one of the tallest structures in Hannibal. Terrell Dempsey, … Read more
Small town newspaper editor decides to ‘publish dead deer photos again’
I managed to resist much of Hannibal’s historic-site hucksterism—the souvenir Mark Twain t-shirts and the ride on the Too-Too Twain. But I succumbed to the Mark Twain Dinette’s 12-foot-tall rotating mug of root beer atop a … Read more
The “Mark Twain” Steamboat
All aboard the Mark Twain! A video of our experience floating down the Mississippi.
Hannibal exhibits ‘invisible’ black population
In some ways the Hannibal, Mo., that Faye Dant, 62, grew up in no longer exists. Dant remembers when schools in Hannibal were still segregated. Around town, there was an unspoken knowledge of the places where … Read more
Featured Content
Twain's Evolution
- Natalie Sheppard discusses being a black Mormon in the Salt Lake City area
- Remembrances of death as well as life in Unionville
- Family history abounds in Kansas
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Immigration Stories
- What Julie Pham learned managing a Vietnamese newspaper in the Pacific Northwest
- From the Mekong to the Mississippi
- Alameda Ghigliones demonstrate the immigrant entrepreneurial spirit with produce business, trucking company
- More in Immigration Stories...
Race and Ethnicity
- What Julie Pham learned managing a Vietnamese newspaper in the Pacific Northwest
- From the Mekong to the Mississippi
- Natalie Sheppard discusses being a black Mormon in the Salt Lake City area
- More in Race and Ethnicity...
Gender Identity
- Before Occupy Wall Street there was The Greening of America
- Visiting the Matthew Shepard murder site, 13 years later
- Joanna Hernandez, president of Unity, tackles challenge of diversity in newsrooms
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