To live or die for Dixie!

That's the one. I can't say that its departure was an architectural loss.
:nopity:

But the crown jewel of the east coast collection is Williamsburg, VA, closely followed by Charleston, SC and Philadelphia. Natchez, MS has the South's largest and most significant collection of plantation houses, by far, but they are not of the colonial period.

...plus longer growing seasons and slave labor.

Unfortunately, cheap cars and gas sucked the life out of NC's downtown areas in the 50s and 60s. Being away from the coast, cheap land was available for the larger towns to spread out in all directions, and they did. Charlotte's physical size is as ridiculous and out of control as Atlanta. Getting around is a pain in the ass. It can take up to an hour to cross town. Asheville is the most significant exception to the trend, due to lack of flat land.

Most of our cities are working hard to bring back their downtown areas, based on the successful Memphis model. Rather than trying to draw retail back in and get shoppers to compete for parking spaces in the daytime, city leaders instead try to bring in restaurants, sports facilities, and nightlife destinations of all kinds, for use when downtown streets and parking decks are greatly underutilized. Greensboro has had the most success with this approach. Wilmington isn't bad.
arty:

Regionally, the best preserved cities in the South are the port towns such as Charleston and Savannah, where suburban growth was limited by water to one direction only.

Poverty often aids historical preservation, since it takes a lot of money to tear down good, sturdy buildings and replace them. This dynamic helped Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans at key times in their history (before the cultural value of preservation became widely recognized) and worked against Charlotte, Richmond, and Atlanta. Downtown Richmond is an architectural nightmare, where bland office towers of dingy glass completely surround Thomas Jefferson's beautiful hilltop State House and keep it in perpetual shadows. Remember the classic Civil War era painting of the burning of Richmond? The State House can no longer be seen from the river.

New Orleans is the only place in the South that I've ever seen an authentic voodoo altar. I found several in residential areas, so they weren't there for the tourists.

 

hahaha the rapture, i love it! four seasons sounds heavenly. in mississippi, we have 9 months of stifling humidity and blazing heat. LITERALLY just from walking from my car to the door of the grocery store i get sweaty. you MUST run the ac 24/7 or you will literally get a heat stroke. old people on a gov. program down here are given extra help with utilities in summer, not winter. christmas eve before last, my mama and i were doing the baking and we had to turn on the air as soon as the oven came on, then bake in shifts because it was so F***ING hot in that kitchen. then because of the humidity none of our candies would set, so everyone received globs of sweets as gifts. welcome to mississippi.

PLEASE show me some of the worse parts of new haven. i bet they look like our ritzy historical district. it would be hilarious to me to see what y'all consider slummy.

 

i am happy again! my mama jean (grandmother) still does this at least once a month for all of us. i learned how to cook from her. the only thing my mama can fix is cornbread, which she is thankfully good at. my great grandmama sat me down when i was thirteen and told me to learn how to cook, because then your husband will always be happy with you and your house will be the one his friends want to be at, you will be the wife their wives envy, etc. i remember that even at thirteen, i wondered what century she thought it was. not that there's anything wrong with pleasing your man or with keeping him well-fed.

 

you just made me laugh so hard! if i came to duluth i would just wear some cute snowboots and my himalaya hat with the earflaps. i would just build snowmen of every shape and size. i would have a snowball fight. i would eat lots of fresh, clean snow and make snow ice cream like they did in "little house on the prairie". i would bring lots of snow inside to melt and i would take a bath in the snow water, because it just sounds refreshing. i would go ice-skating on a frozen pond. make snow angels and build my own igloo. and most of all i would let you yankees teach me how to sled. or is it sleigh? anyway, i have always wanted to go down a big hill on a sled. it looks like so much fun. so do those saucers i see y'all in. and i would wear a pair of mittens, because we don't have them down here.

 

amen!

 

That sounds exactly like the small NC town (population 16,000) that I grew up in. Everybody knows your business, and nobody likes what you're doing, but nobody ever helps anybody unless you are elderly. It's worse now than it used to be, because they have problems with the Mexicans in addition to the black street gangs. The police are afraid of them. I haven't lived there in a long time, but I still can't mention the name of the place because somebody from there would probably read this and call up my mom to tell her I'm talking shit about the town that made me what I am today.

I think most small Southern towns are pretty much alike. I don't know what you can do with any of them except get the hell out and never come back. The only exception to the pattern is when a small town becomes a rich man's bedroom community or vacation destination. Small NC towns like Pinehurst, Jamestown, Clemmons, Davidson, and Blowing Rock are like little pieces of heaven on earth. Chapel Hill used to be like that, but it has grown too much and developed too many crime problems.

I learned that in the mountains of Virginia. The old sleds with the steel runners are the best. It's quite an adrenaline rush, going fast with your face that close to the ground!

 

Hm, I just looked through my albnum of new haven pictures and apparently I didn't focus on taking any of the shitty parts lol. One thing I can show how everything bad in cities just seems to focus around each other. For example, this picture I took literally from the front steps of the house my father's old house which is in more or less the ghetto, though it's improved a lot since I was a kid:

(the real picture is dark and it looks badass this way)

but the towers that are like towering over everything belong to:

English power station which is right around the corner, which is thankfully shut down but the whole of Fair Haven is a dump, then you got the harbor side on the south side of it which is all industrial decay/works and the riverfront near that power plant which is a mess too.
Though on the east side, along the other river, there's a park and a street full of nice condo's running around it:

Which is really nice, which is strange because if you get to where that Bridge in the distance is, if you keep going straight instead of turning onto the bridge, ghetto again, and turns into quickly one of the worst housing places in the city, going left at the bridge is Grand Ave which is a main st, so not totally horrible.

lol I just looked up the temp and it's 25 here while most of Mississippi is in the upper 50's

 

Meh, what the hell I'm going to post more pics, I actually took all these pics and wrote up an awesome story with them and typed it up to post on here until I went to hit post and got stuck by the 4 picture rule, and I was like fuck, but now someone is actually paying attention. So I just copy and pasted it somewhere else.

(the picture of the power plant, that mountain in the distance with the tower on top, that's where I'm at for this picture)
Towards downtown from above:


I like that pic, you can't really see the city so well but it shows you can find green in the city, East Rock park is so lush in plant life



This looks like it's taken on a river in the middle of nowhere or at least the suburbs, but no, it's on the bridge to the base of East Rock, literally there's a busy intersection like 2 blocks away, you can see the bridge I took it from in the picture above it

This on the way up to the summit, going up on a bike sucks, going back down is fantastic:
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v27/TheMadcapSyd/The City/?action=view&current=Picture004.jpg

More city view down old cramped streets where literally in this picture on one side you have Yale, one of the top universities in the world, and the other side regular stores, in fact News Haven is a pretty shitty store.


And I can't post the last ones, but to show it's not all pretty, the bridge I was standing on when I took that picture of the power plant, if I mosey on over to the other side of the bridge and take a picture looking that way we get:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v27/TheMadcapSyd/The City/Picture049.jpg
(the giant ugly bridge is I-95, everyone hates it, its a terrible green color)

And this, I just think the sign is goofy:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v27/TheMadcapSyd/The City/Picture038-1.jpg

New Haven tries to be hip and does a lot of stuff, one of those things being the Arts and Ideas festival

Also this, I specifically took note of this because in a lot of places this would just not happen:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v27/TheMadcapSyd/The City/Picture041-1.jpg
Note the Italian flag flying below the American one, the city switches between the Irish, Italian, and dun du dun, Puerto Rican flag all year long to celebrate the cities 3 main immigrant groups.

And here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v27/TheMadcapSyd/The City/Picture033-1.jpg
Aside from the pretty flowers, on that island in the middle of the street there's a bunch of benches and a friend and I were sitting there one night on a lot of LSD when we got to watch a man go insane on the sidewalk, get tackled by police, have like 30 cops show up and just leave him there screaming for 1/2 an hour. It was probably the most interesting thing I've ever seen. All because I wanted a milkshake.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/c...fly-man-arrested-at-gourmet-heaven-for-theft/
Note how crappy the descriptions are, because we went back an hour later to buy more drinks and everyone else who had seen it had gone, and the store owner wasn't talking about it, I made the mistake of opening my mouth and this guy was trying to pry information out of me and my friend, both 2 people who were in no condition to remember what happened an hour before.

 

Abraham Lincoln is often considered the greatest president because he "saved the Union", that is, he kept the southern states from successfully seceding and forming their own Confederate government, and he "freed the slaves" by signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

To understand the struggle between the North and South, we have to look at how both sides viewed the Federal government and States' rights. Remember that in 1860 the United States of America, commonly called "the Union" in those days, was only 84 years old. Most of the key political figures had parents who lived during the time of the American revolution, so the concept of "the Union" and a centralized Federal government as a permanent political structure was not as prevalent as it is today.

The dominant view in the North, which Lincoln shared, was that the states who had entered into the Union at the time of the Revolutionary War were bound to stay in the Union, by military force if necessary, and could not withdraw or secede from the Union.

The Southern states viewed their participation in the Union as voluntary and that secession was their right if the Federal government over-stepped it's Constitutional powers and encroached on the States' rights to self-rule.

In fact, the key issue in the presidential election which Lincoln won was not whether the South should give up slavery, but whether the Federal government could outlaw slavery in new states that were entering the Union. The Southern states felt that giving the Federal government this kind of power would weaken their own right to decide whether they would be slave states or free states.

As for Lincoln, he had made it clear during the election that although he was against slavery he would not use the Federal government to eliminate slavery in the South and would let slavery, which was already declining, die naturally due to free market forces.

Economic power was also at stake in the North/South divide. Contrary to what most history classes teach, the Panic of 1857 had devastated the Northern economy which was based on manufacturing and banking, while the Southern states, whose economy was primarily based on agriculture, were virtually untouched by the economic crisis gripping the North.

If the Southern states, which had the advantage of goods to export and good shipping facilities, withdrew from the Union and established free trade internationally it would further decimate the North financially.

To prevent this from happening, the Federal government used it's military forces to control the trade of the South, imposing taxes on cotton and tariffs on exports, leading to further division. The first battle of the Civil War, the attack on Union forces at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, was in response to this kind of meddling in free trade by the Federal government.

The day after the Confederate forces captured Fort Sumter, Lincoln called up 75,000 militiamen from the states to suppress the Southern rebellion.

The conflict between North and South was now a full-fledged civil war. By the time the Union won the war four years later, more than 620,000 soldiers died in combat and over a million more died from disease.

How the Civil War changed America

The political consequences of the war were enormous. By virtue of it's victory, the Union had stopped the secession of the Confederacy and given the Federal government much more power over the States.

That Federal power kept growing and continues to grow to this day, threatening the freedoms and liberties that the founders of our country sought to guarantee to all citizens in the Constitution.

America now borders on becoming a Socialist state with the Federal government now in charge of the well-being of over half the population through it's entitlement programs like Welfare, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, the Prescription Drug Program, farm subsidies, earmarks, and Earned Income Credits. The near future probably includes universal health care insurance and child-care programs that will place all children in government run day cares from infancy and continue to indoctrinate them through graduation from high school and even into college.

The economic landscape also changed dramatically. The Northern states manufacturing based economy became dominant and the industrial revolution accelerated beyond anyone's imagination. As in most wars, research, development, and technology were instrumental in victory and now in the following peace time those talents were turned towards the market place and the expansion of America to the west.

Agricultural production started to shift away from the South and into the new states in the mid-west. New railroads made transporting agricultural and manufactured products easier and led to greater integration of the economies of the North, South, and West. As modern machinery entered the workplace and labor unions formed, people worked less hours and now turned their attention to education and leisure activities.

The social structure of America also changed forever after the Civil War. The most obvious change was the newly granted freedom to millions of slaves who could now vote, own land, start businesses, and hold political office. Although it was easy to legislate freedom, changing the way whites and blacks in America viewed each other would take another hundred and forty years of hard work and tolerance.

A subtle but dangerous change in our country also occurred as a result of the Union victory in the Civil War. As noted, Lincoln felt it was not the government's role to force and end to slavery, and that the free market would accomplish that eventually.

But now the government has become a vehicle for social change. Instead of individuals using education, the free market, and dialogue to elevate people from poverty and correct injustice, the government was now viewed as the instrument of change, whether it was addressing racial injustice, establishing wage controls, reducing gun ownership, restricting free speech in campaigns, saving the whales, stopping global warming, access to abortion, fighting AIDS, or the war on drugs.

Today America is at a political cross-roads as unlike any time since the election of 1860. We can choose to follow the liberals into a totally socialistic state like those found in Europe or we can fight for the conservative values of individual freedom and liberty with less government interference in our lives.

 

I'm proud of my heritage. My forefathers fought for states rights, not slavery. Yanks will never understand that.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vPVTqWJd28"]YouTube- Dixie to arms! - Dixie war song of the Confederacy

 

Confederate song "Dixie to arms!"
Lyrics by Albert Pike, 1861

Southrons, hear ye Country call ye!
Up! Lest worse than death befall you!
To arms! To arms! To arms! In Dixie!
Lo! All the beacon fires are lighted,
Let all hearts be now united!
To arms! To arms! To arms! In Dixie!

Advance the flag of Dixie!
Hurrah! Hurrah!
For Dixie's land we take our stand,
To live or die for Dixie!
To arms! To arms!
And conquer peace for Dixie!
To arms! To arms!
And conquer peace for Dixie!
Oh, hear the Northern thunders mutter!
Northern flags and South winds fluter,
To arms! To arms! To arms! In Dixie!
Send them back your fierce defiance!
Stamp upon the cursed alliance!
To arms! To arms! To arms! In Dixie!

Advance the flag of Dixie!
Hurrah! Hurrah!
For Dixie's land we take our stand,
To live or die for Dixie!
To arms! To arms!
And conquer peace for Dixie!
To arms! To arms!
And conquer peace for Dixie!
Fear no danger! Shun no labor!
Lift up rifle, pike, and saber!
To arms! To arms! To arms! In Dixie!
Shoulder press and post to shoulder,
Let the odds make each heart bolder!
To arms! To arms! To arms! In Dixie!

Advance the flag of Dixie!
Hurrah! Hurrah!
For Dixie's land we take our stand,
To live or die for Dixie!
To arms! To arms!
And conquer peace for Dixie!
To arms! To arms!
And conquer peace for Dixie!
Then I wish I was in Dixie,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
For Dixie's land we take our stand,
To live or die in Dixie!
Away, away, away down south in Dixie!
Away, away, away down south in Dixie!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4RYo7vJ6g"]YouTube- Heroes & Flags of the Confederate States of America

 

To largeamount: at 19 you have no idea what it means to stand for ones convictions. The men who laid down their lives for the South were "hip" in every sense of the word. Since your from New York I can understand why your so misinformed.

Hank Jr. said it best: If heaven ain't a lot like Dixie, I don't wanna go,
If heaven ain't a lot like Dixie, I'd just as soon stay home.
If they don't have a Grand Ole Opry, like they do in Tennessee,
Just send me to hell or New York City, it would be about the same to me.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cCu8H6RbbI"]YouTube- If The South Woulda Won

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g555DkvLESo"]YouTube- If Heaven Ain't A Lot Like Dixie

 

flags are for pussies.

also, lol@ everyone in this thread for getting trolled.
no one actually thinks like this guy... they all died like 150 years ago.

 

Your what, 12 or 13 years old?