Harold K. Bush, known to his friends as Hal, passed away earlier this week after a prolonged and finally unsuccessful recovery from a traumatic brain injury. Hal was a professor at St. Louis University and an acclaimed Twain scholar, probably best known for Mark Twain & The Spiritual Crisis of His Age (2007) and The Letters of Mark Twain & Joseph Hopkins Twichell (2017). His chapter on Twain in Continuing […]
How did the editor of a paper that was habitually rude to Frederick Douglass end up with the manuscript of his Emancipation Day speech?
On August 3, 1880, Frederick Douglass provided the keynote of a large, day-long celebration of Emancipation in Elmira. His speech is reconstructed here for the first time.
A highly suspect, but entertaining pamphlet by Frank Kelsey, who purported to be Mark Twain’s drinking buddy.
All these lecture and more can be found in the “Trouble Begins Archive.”
Explore the CMTS Mark Twain Archive!
Fourteen more downloadable lectures have been added to the “Trouble Begins” Archives. Most of these lectures come from the years 2009-2014. In 1985, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies inaugurated The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title comes from a handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The lectures are now held in the Spring, Summer, and […]
Four lectures from the long-running CMTS “Trouble Begins” lecture series are now available for download in a variety of different formats, including MP3 and Apple Lossless. We will continue to add more past lectures, including talks from some of the most famous scholars of Mark Twain Studies, including Henry Nash Smith, Louis Budd, and Michael Kiskis. Additionally, we will post the most recent lectures to this website as soon as […]
Thomas K. Beecher manuscript for Olivia Susan Clemens’s memorial service
