Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on February 11, 2019EDITOR”S NOTE: The following was offered as an introduction to the performance of “Mark Twain’s Music Box” at the Park Church in Elmira on February 8th, 2019.117 years ago this week, in February of 1902, Mark...
Originally posted by: Lubna Alzaroo on August 19th, 2021On the front page of the August 4, 1880 issue of the New York Times, above the fold no less, there appears a report on Frederick Douglass’s Emancipation Day speech the previous afternoon. Events in the city of...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on November 20, 2018On Thanksgiving Day, 1868, Olivia Langdon “yielded a conditional consent” to Sam Clemens’s third proposal of marriage. They had know each other for less than a year, having been introduced on the occasion of a...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on November 19, 2016Thanksgiving dinner at Quarry Farm in 1897 was planned by Susan Crane and described on elegant cards featuring the family cats. A surviving copy of these menu cards, located in the Mark Twain Archive at Elmira...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on February 1, 2017Mark Twain described his Autobiography as an “apparently systemless system…a complete and purposed jumble,” and so it is, though it is not wholly without method. Over the course of its composition Twain relied...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on December 21, 2016On December 18, 1868, Mark Twain resumed his “American Vandals” lecture tour after the briefest respite. He had traveled overnight and throughout the day to arrive in Elmira following a performance in Scranton....
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on July 20, 2021The above short film debuts as part of Summer Orientation at Elmira College. It was designed to introduce incoming students and their parents to the historical connections between Mark Twain, his extended family, and...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on August 2, 2021The following essay is published as part of Emancipation Week, alongside Frederick Douglass’s 1880 speech, “The Lessons of Emancipation to a New Generation,” delivered as part of Emancipation Day celebrations in...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on September 16, 2019In her recent salute to Mad Magazine, Barbara Schmidt alluded to the rare pamphlet, Drinking With Twain, self-published by Frank E. Kelsey. The Center for Mark Twain Studies is in possession of one of the five...
Originally posted by: Matt Seybold on December 29th, 2017 1868 was a pretty important year for Sam Clemens. Over the course of it, he would turn the Quaker City cruise of the preceding year into a lucrative cross-country lecture tour and what would prove to be a...