My Mark Twain site at About.com is about to be closed. An announcement went out today that it is one of 300 sites About.com is closing in a major reduction and refocusing of its services. Because of the nature of the cuts, they have encouraged all of us to place our materials online elsewhere and I have moved most of the content from the About.com site back to where it started from, the original Mark Twain Resources on the World Wide Web site at http://www.boondocksnet.com/twainwww/ Many of you probably remember that site from 1995-1997 before it became the core of the About.com site. Because I've been expecting this cut since April, I've already moved all of the Twain texts, biographies, criticism, and political cartoons to that site and have created updated guides to many of his major writings. If any of you were planning to refer students to those materials, please use the new URLs so students' access wont be interrupted when the About.com site is taken down. Many of the more substantive articles I wrote for the site have just been uploaded there and I'll be working on getting the rest in place over the next week or two so there wont be much of an interruption in their availability. Any of you who have never seen the BoondocksNet.com site might want to look around. Besides the Twain-specific materials, there are a lot of contextual materials relevant to Twain's last years. They include in-depth sites on the anti-imperialist movement (with writings by Howells, C. E. S. Wood, Carnegie, Carl Schurz, Dan Beard and other friends) and the Congo Reform Association. There's also a lot of other more general material on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Jim Jim Zwick [log in to unmask] http://www.boondocksnet.com/