Mark Twain meets a Black tour guide in Mid 19th Century Venice who introduces him to the Renaissance.......
While reading Paul Kaplan's Contraband guides : Race, transatlantic culture, and the arts in the civil war era. I came across the following passage...
Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. In this best-selling 1869 account of a European five hundred published memoirs of European travel and trip taken in 1867, Twain devotes several pages to the guidebooks to an (unnamed) tour guide who introduced him both to the artistic splendors of Venice and to the term “Renaissance.”14 Twain describes this man as the son of South Carolina slaves and at the same time elegant, learned, and fully acculturated to his European environment.
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Kaplan, P. H. D. (2020). Contraband guides : Race, transatlantic culture, and the arts in the civil war era.Pennsylvania State University Press.