Word: twains
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Twain plainly thought war a foolish thing, and when, in Private History, he pulls his gun and kills a man riding through the woods, thinking him an enemy, we can feel for Twain and his young companions, standing there trembling in the darkness, wishing they could bring their victim back to life. After only two weeks' service, he resigned his commission. In his autobiography, Twain explains that he was "'incapacitated by fatigue' through persistent retreating...
Relations between blacks and whites were hardly the limits of Twain's concern over race. His essay Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy discusses a young man arrested in San Francisco for "stoning Chinamen." After laying out the many ways in which Chinese immigrants were persecuted in California, Twain expresses little surprise that the young man might have learned to say to himself, "Ah, there goes a Chinaman! God will not love me if I do not stone him." Twain's essay About Smells notes that in Heaven, one will meet people of all races--he lists...
...Twain's racial pitch was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were called "nigger shows" in his youth--these were minstrel shows, mostly with white men performing in blackface--and his delight in getting his prim mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent assaults on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not. The shows were simply a form of entertainment popular all over the country...
...Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as sensible as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, prosecuted and won a war to free him nevertheless. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a member of a Confederate militia, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to rile the nation over racial injustice and rouse its collective...
...those heads swell, however. News in the form of edgy drollery may seem a brave new thing, but it can all be traced back to one source, the man Ernest Hemingway said all of modern American literature could be traced back to: Mark Twain. Oh, that old cracker-barrel guy, you may say. White suit, cigar, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated--but he died back in 1910, no? White, male, and didn't he write in dialect? What does he have to do with the issues...