Traveling with Twain

In Search of America's Identity

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Memories of a mill town: Simple acts of kindness in Southbridge

Videos on YouTube portray Southbridge, Mass., as a dying mill town of loonies and losers. A snippet from producer Rod Murphy’s “Greater Southbridge” documentary makes Jerry Sciesnewski, a stuttering collector of empty soda and beer cans, … Read more >>

Ingrid Mattson on being Canadian, converting to Islam and post-9/11 perceptions

She was described as “the most noticed figure among American Muslim women” in a 2010 New York Times article. At 48, Ingrid Mattson struck me as a mirthful, sassy person, whose eruptive laughs were punctuated with … Read more >>

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: Ghost stories in Mark Twain’s Hartford mansion

Let me just start by saying that Steve Courtney, publicist and guide at the Mark Twain House & Museum, does not believe in ghosts. But in the sleepy Hartford pre-dawn, Team Twain was intrepidly coming into … Read more >>

Scholar Kerry Driscoll investigates Twain’s lingering prejudice against Indians

Kerry Driscoll was up-front with us: “I’m a bonafide Twainiac.” Driscoll is an English professor at St. Joseph’s College in West Hartford, and she’s spent the last 10 years working on a book about Mark Twain’s … Read more >>

The role of immigration in Hartford, Conn.

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 >>