It is safe to say that most secondary school students know Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn from their novels. But they do know less of the enormous variety in Mark Twain’s literary output and the extraordinary triumphs and tragedies of his life. If using class time to show a film, teachers must have precise learning objectives, making certain to engage students’ attention and prompt them to respond with fuller appreciation […]
The 2017 Park Church Summer Lecture Series, presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, continues Wednesday, June 21 at 7:00 p.m., with its final lecture of the season, “Artemus Ward: The Man Who Made Lincoln Laugh” presented by John Pascal, teacher at Seton Hall Prep School. It is generally accepted that during his lifetime, Mark Twain was considered the preeminent American master storyteller and lecturer of humor. […]
Although Mark Twain’s religious skepticism is well-known, some of his closest friends were clergymen and persons with a strong faith. In Elmira, New York, Twain became good friends with a most unusual clergyman, the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, pastor of The Park Church, of which Jervis Langdon, Twain’s father-in-law, was a founding member. Please join CMTS for three nights of lectures at The Park Church, one of the most […]
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 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 […]
Adam McKay’s Oscar-winning film The Big Short opens with the above epigraph. Seems appropriate enough, for a cautionary tale about financial bubbles inflated by mass delusion. The film, like the Michael Lewis book upon which it is based, focuses with sometimes queasy admiration on the handful of financiers who bet against the conventional wisdom of the Greenspan era: that U.S. housing prices would rise in perpetuity. The epigraph describes what, in […]
