Tag Archives: social commentary

Isabella Beecher Hooker

The Constitutional Rights Of The Women Of The United States

 

The Constitutional Rights Of The Women Of The United States: An Address Before the International Council of Women, Washington D. C., March 30, 1888

by Isabella Beecher Hooker

In the month of August, 1774, that eminent statesman and true patriot, Thomas, Jefferson, in a little tract entitled “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” used certain words which I will take for my text while addressing you to-day on the “Constitutional Rights of the Women Citizens of the United States.” They are these: Continue reading The Constitutional Rights Of The Women Of The United States →

Mark Twain, Samuel L. Clemens

Speech in Honor of Cornelius Walford

The following speech was delivered at an October 15, 1874, dinner at Hartford’s premier hotel, the Allyn House, given by members of the city’s insurance industry in honor of Britisher Cornelius Walford. A resident of the city for four years, Clemens had its number. He refers to the Hartford Accident Insurance Co., a short-lived company of which he served as a director. Walford (1827-1885) was active in the British insurance industry and the author of an insurance encyclopedia. Continue reading Speech in Honor of Cornelius Walford →

Mark Twain, Samuel L. Clemens

from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Shifting from Clemens’s comical letters, speeches and short pieces to his classic, we get a sense of the depth he brought to his work. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was composed largely at Quarry Farm, Olivia Clemens’s sister Susan Crane’s farm in Elmira, New York. The family spent most of their summers there during the time they lived in Hartford, and Crane had built a study for her brother-in-law high on a hill overlooking the farm and the city. Continue reading from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn →

Mark Twain, Samuel L. Clemens

from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Clemens’s fascination with English history developed with his visits to the country and his research for The Prince and the Pauper (1881), a tale of a royal and a commoner changing places so each could find out what he had been envying. He was fascinated by the Elizabethan period and its wholesome frankness about sex and bodily functions, which he celebrated in a short obscene work called 1601: Conversation as it Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors. The book was concealed to all but select male friends, but is now freely readable on the Internet. Continue reading from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court →

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