Monday, July 2, 2012

If You Can't Stand the Heat, Move South (with Air Conditioning)

In the midst of our current heat wave, two stories that don't appear to be related, but are:

Cities that Wouldn't Exist Without Air Conditioning (from the Atlantic)

and

Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America (from Alternet).


2 comments:

Ms Sparrow said...

Wow, the Conservative Southern Values article is an eye-opener!

Daughter Number Three said...

It made me think about Steven Pinker's analysis of the South, as a place dominated by people who had emigrated from sheep-herding cultures. And that herding cultures tend to be territorial and retribution-oriented.

A bit different from this analysis. I had never heard before that most/many Southern plantation owners had come from the Caribbean. It appears her source for that was Colin Woodard's American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Probably worth checking that out.