Brief Summary Of Chapter 16 Of Mark Twain's

I was inspired by a quote in Chapter 16 of A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn. The quote was from Mark Twain’s novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and stated “You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are it's mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags-that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy,

This book, called The Innocents Abroad, was published in 1869, 7 years before he published Tom Sawyer and 16 years prior to the writing of Huckleberry Finn. The Innocents Abroad shares the story of Twain’s experiences on a cruise. He explores the ignorance and arrogance common among Americans that causes us to feel as though we are better than foreigners and not care to learn about their culture. In the book Mark Twain states that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”(7) In this he is saying that only by traveling can we gain the insight to have an open mind and kill the stereotypes we have been taught to believe. He also says that because of this fact a lot of people should really travel; which in his backhanded way is saying that way too many people are prejudiced and ignorant to their world. Because of Twain’s brutally honest insights to American nature this book made a huge impact on our world. It called for people to stop being stereotypical and to learn how things are for themselves. This was very important to the world and continues to be an important thing for people to learn and accomplish. Therefore, The Innocents Abroad was a huge and important start to Twain’s impactful