The Civil War as America’s Second Chance
At Trenton and Independence Hall, Lincoln wondered at the willingness of our patriotic ancestors to imperil their lives for a nation that did not yet and perhaps would never exist.
M. Lynn Weiss
M. Lynn Weiss is associate professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. She edited Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana; The Jew of Seville; The Fortune Teller by Victor Séjour and Jules Choppin (1830-1914) New Orleans Poems in Creole and French.
By M. Lynn Weiss
The Adventures and Misadventures of Samuel Clemens
Everything about Mark Twain, Ron Chernow shows us, is writ large, heartbreak and loss a constant redundancy, his explosive fits of anger and condemnation, his repeated lapses into sentimentality, a reiteration of public complaints somehow enabled rather than contradicted by his wondrous humor, a wit at once profound and outrageous. But Twain’s is merely an exaggeration of our existence, its pain and its joy, our past, and our culture, inescapably our Americanness.
A Professor Goes Out On the Street
This is not about how it feels to be homeless. It is merely about someone who, knowing little of such matters and without money in his pockets, went onto the streets of St. Louis and found shelter and food, and it is about what and whom he saw in the process.
“And I saw, I can do this.”
M. Lynn Weiss, associate professor of English and American Studies at William & Mary, conducts at 2014 interview with Adrienne Kennedy, one of the most prominent voices of African-American theater.
