Dolan’s Trouble Begins Lecture Now Available

The public was invited to attend the 2024 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series, presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies and supported by the generous donations of The Mark Twain Foundation. The second free lecture was held Wednesday, Oct. 9 in the Barn at Quarry Farm with a presentation by Kathryn Dolan of the Missouri University of Science and Technology.  

Entitled, “Mining Gilt,” Dolan takes a closer look at The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. The satirical novel exposes the greed, corruption, and social issues of the post-Civil Era United States. Together, Twain and Warner are effective at ironically describing and criticizing the exploitation of land witnessed during their time, specifically through mining, in much the same way as they do with corrupt politicians. They predict the significance of coal that lasts into modern times similar to their prediction of the era now referred to as the Gilded Age.

Dolan is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on sustainability, food studies, and globalization. She published Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850-1905 and Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination. Her most recent book, Breakfast Cereal: A Global History, examines the cultural history of breakfast cereal. Her current project, Imagining Tomorrow’s Bread, studies sustainability in descriptions of food in futuristic texts.

The remaining lectures in this year’s Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series are listed below. All lectures are free and open to the public. Find recordings of previous lectures here. 

• 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 16, at the Barn at Quarry Farm: “Mark Twain, the Novel, and 1492” by Timothy Donahue, Oakland University
• 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 23, at the Barn at Quarry Farm: “Before There Was Twain There Was Whitcher” by Linda A. Morris, University of California, Davis 

About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series

In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College’s campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.