Tag: Fake News

The Alternative Facts of 1863: Mark Twain’s “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson”

Posted on by Dwayne Eutsey

“Fake news” isn’t really anything new. Robert Darnton points out in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books that “the concoction of alternative facts is hardly rare, and the equivalent of today’s poisonous, bite-size texts and tweets can be found in most periods of history, going back to the ancients.” As noted previously in this blog, in his early career as a journalist Mark Twain dabbled in this […]

The Best Defense is a Good Offense: False Virtue, Fake News, & Mark Twain’s Birthday Roast of Ben Franklin

Posted on by Matt Seybold

On this date in 1856, Samuel Clemens, at barely twenty years of age, gave what was likely the first of the improvised comedic toasts for which he would, as Mark Twain, become widely renowned. The occasion was an impromptu celebration of the sesquicentennial of Benjamin Franklin’s birth. As the Keokuck Daily Gate City reported it, a group of local printers, including Orion Clemens, who ran the Ben Franklin Book & Job Office, […]