Is it acceptable (or perhaps even imperative) that the United States works to spread democratic liberty, even when nation building requires warfare on behalf of the oppressed? I argue that Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a useful aid for reflection regarding this question. What Twain accomplishes, thanks in great part to his humor, is an honest exposure of the ...

Meg Groeling analyzes nineteenth-century American humor by examining the musings of Artemus Ward—alternate persona to Charles Farrar Browne—and his fans’ reactions work, including that Abraham Lincoln. Browne’s Ward was an “illiterate rube with ‘Yankee’ common sense,” explains. In short order, schtick evolved from newspaper essays internationally touring live-action show, complete purposefully ...