Mark Twain

Mark Twain would be hopelessly out of favor with both wings of the modern duopoly.

Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism.

The disease afflicted the author as he was writing what would become "The Innocents Abroad."

Even Twain's own autobiography cannot reveal the whole truth of the literary legend.

In his later years, the famous writer surrounded himself with a bevy of adoring adolescents.

“I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” Twain said. “It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.”

A long Euro-American tradition of genocide and ethnic cleansing imagined freeing a barren Palestine from Palestinian barbarity and heathenism.

Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’s classic 'Huckleberry Finn' into a tragedy.

What were Americans' immediate responses to "A Christmas Carol," and how did Dickens' reading tours and eventual death reshape its meaning?

It's probably further back than you think.

Debunking myths about the Pony Express.

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.

Percival Everett refashions a Mark Twain classic.

A shocking image of the 1906 atrocity survived but failed to become a humanitarian touchstone.

It puts the people in the most peril in the center of the story: the people being systematically exploited, chained, whipped and raped.

Already prone to boiler explosions that regularly killed scores of passengers, steamboats were pushed to their limits in races that valued speed over safety.

Ken Burns’ account of prohibition tells a popular story of booze in America. The historical record is far more sobering.

A new history makes a case for the world-ordering power of wheat.

The iconic songwriter has transcended time and place for 60 years. What should that mean for the rest of us?

Digital archiving is shoddy and incomplete, and it will hamper the ability of future generations to understand the current era.