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 >>
We have stopped at what remains of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, Money, Mississippi, site of an incident that led to a brutal murder that helped kick-start the civil rights revolution. On August 14, 1955, Emmett … Read more
I remember Ernest Withers of Memphis as a distinguished civil rights photographer, whose message to journalism students at Emory and Northwestern Universities, when I invited him to speak, was more spiritual than shutter-speed, f-stop practical. Shortly … Read more
In traveling the country, I’m often impressed by those who do not travel—people who stay put and devote their lives to transforming institutions. During my visit to Holly Springs, Mississippi, I visit David Beckley, in his … Read more
We spend another day driving south, today through three Mississippi river towns famous in part for their connection to the life of Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) as a steamboat pilot—what he called “the only unfettered and … Read more
After visiting the Lower Ninth Ward and seeing for ourselves the devastation that Hurricane Katrina caused in the area, we stopped at the Bayou Bienvenue, hoping to find a vantage point from which to film the … Read more
