States Of The United States

"Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free, The breezes so balmy and light, That I would not exchange my home on the range For all of the cities so bright."

"How often at night when the heavens are bright With the light from the glittering stars, Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed If their glory exceeds that of ours."

"Kansas law puts transgender people in an impossible position. For transgender people, using the restroom consistent with their gender and how they live their lives, is now against the law in government buildings. But using the restroom consistent with their sex at birth in government buildings may out them as transgender and be unsafe. Either way, transgender people may be punished and harassed."

"Although it is now covered with agriculture, Kansas was at one time very historic. It was the on-scene location of the "Wild West," where "longhorns" riding "six-shooters" used to "rustle up" some "varmints." This era eventually ended due to a shortage of quotion marks, but Kansans are still proud of their state's rough-and-tumble tradition, and will often greet a stranger by warmly breaking a chair over his head. Kansas also contains manufacturing and tumbleweeds, which are plants that form themselves into ginat balls that roll across the prairie and burst into your motel room at night, which is why the American Automobile Association recommends that you always sleep with a weed whacker."

"The red man was pressed from this part of the West, He's likely no more to return To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever Their flickering camp-fires burn."

"Ad Astra Per Aspera"

"Really Kansas is two states, or maybe even three. One line of division is of course that which cuts through the Dakotas and Nebraska too, the 98th meridian. Western Kansas is short-grass country, sparsely settled, with scanty rainfall and big mechanized farms, based on wheat. The east is moist, with thick alluvial soil; here we touch the corn belt. In between is an area more difficult to define, "central" Kansas, which is mostly (of course I am oversimplifying) alfalfa and grazing country. South of Kansas is cotton, and north is spring wheat; Kansas grows neither, and its two great crops are of course winter wheat and corn. The gist of the Kansas "story" is, in a way, a struggle between wheat and corn, although plenty of farmers grow both. Corn is cultivated in every county now. It doesn't, however, come anywhere near the importance of wheat in the state's economy, and Kansas is the greatest wheat state in the Union by far. Wheat, as we know, is a crop not without risks; also, in Kansas at least, it used to be called a "lazy man's crop." In the old days you planted it in September, whereupon there was nothing to do until you harvested it the next summer, whereupon you paid off the bank. Not now. Wheat farmers are busy all the year. They have hogs, soy beans, sheep, lespedeza, and sorghums like feterita, to lessen their dependence on wheat, and to provide an income all the year around. Above all, land planted in wheat (until it starts to "joint") may be used for grazing; the wheat is green before the snow comes, and then again in spring; a most remarkable thing in this part of the world is that the miore you pasture wheat, the better will be the wheat produced; it does wheat good to be eaten as it grows!- almost as cropping a beard in an adolescent makes the beard stronger. This technique of growing livestock on growing wheat means, in effect, that the wheat farmer gets two wheat crops a year, one in the form of meat. I asked the Capper editors what distinguished Kansas farmers as against those of any other state. They replied: (1) aggressiveness; (2) willingness to experiment; (3) the gambling instinct, imposed of necessity by the risks of wind and rain; (4) modernity. It may seem a poor figure, but at least one-third of Kansas farms are electrified."

"The trip to South Lake took another three hours. Blackwell stared out the window the whole time looking at nothing, which is to say, New Jersey."

"Even as the national press wrote the KKK’s obituary, local newspapers were writing about radical racist groups operating in their midst. Then, in the summer of 1940, a bizarre and frightening development took place. As Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime flexed its muscles far away in Europe, resurgent Ku Klux Klan factions began flirting with a new breed of Nazi hate groups in the United States. The Klan was cozying up to the German-American Bund, an association led by Nazi sympathizers who praised Hitler, preached fascism, wore Nazi uniforms, and snapped off stiff-armed salutes to flags decorated with a swastika. The powerful and resilient New Jersey Klan led the negotiations with the Bund and arranged a joint rally at a Bund training camp outside Andover, New Jersey. On August 14, 1940, more than a thousand robed and hooded Klansmen and several hundred gray-shirted Bundsman assembled on the grounds of Camp Nordland for a day of anti-Semitic speeches and Negro bashing. As the Bundesfuhrer moved to center stage and proclaimed, “The principles of the Bund and the principles of the Klan are the same,” the KKK Grand Giant from New Jersey stepped forward and clasped the Bundsman’s hand in a show of unity. After the speeches a Klan wedding was held beneath a fiery cross, as if to symbolize a new union between the international and American forms of fascism. As the event reached a crescendo, hundreds of incensed citizens from nearby Andover decided they had had enough of the Nazis and the Klan in their own backyards. The mob gathered at the camp gate and screamed chants like “Burn Hitler on your cross.” The forces of hate were threatening to get out of control."

"These people were of all races, colors, and creeds. French were in the north and in the Carolinas. Dutch had built the town on Manhattan island, and their patroons' estates in the Hudson valley; now they were building their own cabins in the Mohawk Indian country that is now New York State. Germans had settled in the Jerseys and in the far west, beyond Philadelphia. Germans and Scotch-Irish were climbing the Carolina mountains; Swedes were in Delaware, English and French and Dutch and Irish were settled in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire Grants, Connecticut, and Virginia. Mingled with all these were Italians, Portuguese, Finns, Arabs, Armenians, Russians, Greeks, and Africans from a dozen very different African peoples and cultures. Black, brown, yellow and white, all these peoples were some of them free and some of them slaves. Also they were intermarried with the American Indians."

"I'm from N-E-W Jerz, where plenty murders occur. No points to be calmer, we're bringin' drama to all you herbs!"

"[I]t's about a quarter-past three and shorty's eyein' me. I got the Bentley valeted and I'm just outside of Jersey, past the Palisades."

"When the mayor of a New Jersey township accepted a request from a resident to fly the Tibetan flag on the eve of , he had no inkling it would attract the attention of the Chinese Communist] government. …The incident illustrates how far Chinese [Communist Party] officials will go to try to exert control over members of Tibetan diaspora communities abroad, especially during politically sensitive anniversaries and holidays, such as Losar, which began this year on Feb. 10."

"There's a girl in Arkansas; the sheriff is her brother-in-law. Can't go back to Arkansas, I'm a bad, bad man."

"You can tell your mom I moved to Arkansas; you can tell your dog to bite my leg. Or tell your brother Cliff, whose fist can tell my lip. He never really liked me anyway."

"IOWA: Her affections like the rivers of her borders, flow to an unseparable union."

"In all that is Good, Iowa affords the best."

"Iowa and Minnesota play for a pig, a statuette rendition of the actual brother of a porcine star of a Will Rogers movie. I would like to remind you that this is, on balance, a marvelous nation."

"I was lost too. What else would I have been doing in Iowa?"

"Iowa and Minnesota play for a pig, a statuette rendition of the actual brother of a porcine star of a Will Rogers movie. I would like to remind you that this is, on balance, a marvelous nation."

"A beautiful summer day in Iowa leaves no room for worry."

"Why, the justices [of Iowa] asked in conclusion, do statutes and civil law protect the secret of the confession? This is based, they answered, on “the idea that the human being does sometimes have need of a place of penitence and confession and spiritual discipline. When any person enters that secret chamber, [the law] closes the door upon him, and civil authority turns away its ear. The privilege of the statute purports to be applicable to every Christian denomination, of whatever polity. Under the polity of the Presbyterian denomination, this privilege cannot be applicable to it unless it be true that the ruling elders are ‘ministers of the Gospel,’” when sitting collectively as a committee."

"There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis"

"This is devastating news and our hearts are broken for the families of those who lost loved ones. The city stands ready to help them in their time of grief."

"It was like dying and going to hell, except a little hotter and a little sticky gear. July in Tennessee was not the ideal weather in which to fight in a barrel."

"[W]hat better place to end it than where I started – in Ohio."

"Alabama's gotten me so upset/Tennessee made me lose my rest/And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam"

"Westward lay the march of American Empire. Within thirty years of the establishment of the Union nine new states had been formed in the Mississippi valley, and two in the borders of New England. As early as 1769 men like Daniel Boone had pushed their way into the Kentucky country, skirmishing with the Indians. But the main movement over the mountains began during the War of Independence. The migration of the eighteenth century took two directions: the advance westward towards the Ohio, with its settlement of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the occupation of the north-west forest regions, the fur-traders’ domain, beyond Lake Erie."

"The colonisation of New England and the eastern coastline of America had been mainly the work of powerful companies, aided by the English Crown or by feudal proprietors with chartered rights. But here in the new lands of the West any man with an axe and a rifle could carve for himself a rude frontier home. By 1790 there were thirty-five thousand settlers in the Tennessee country, and double that number in Kentucky. By 1800 there were a million Americans west of the mountain ranges of the Alleghenies. From these new lands a strong, self-reliant Western breed took its place in American life. Modem American democracy was bom and cradled in the valley of the Mississippi. The foresight of the first independent Congress of the United States had proclaimed for all time the principle that when new territories gained a certain population they should be admitted to statehood upon an equality with the existing partners of the Union. It is a proof of the quality and power of the Westerners that eleven of the eighteen Presidents of the United States between 1828 and 1901 were either bom or passed the greater part of their lives in the valley of the Mississippi."

"Young Buck, it's a Tennessee thing!"

"I met Dolly Parton in Tennessee; her titties were filled with Hennessy. That country music really drove me crazy, but I rode that ass and said, "Yes, Miss Daisy!""

"Young Buck, we don't give a fuck. We must represent this Tennessee; we drink a whole lot of Hennessy."

"West Virginians have hidden their weak sense of community behind a particularly strident form of state patriotism, but the disguise is very thin. The characteristic expressions are boasts, slogans, and distortions of historical fact. Traditionally schoolbooks adopted what might be called the "Soviet Encyclopedia" approach to local history, recalling the Stalinist propaganda that sought to establish a Russian inventor or setting for every important development of the modern world. West Virginia's boosters have not gone quite so far, but West Virginia children are still expected to believe that James Rumsey, not Robert Fulton, invented the steamboat; that Amos Dolbear, not Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone; that Point Pleasant, not Lexington, was the first battle of the American Revolution, and so on. They are also taught to memorize the West Virginia locations of such items as the world's largest clothespin factory, the world's largest ashtray, and to make an inordinate fuss about West Virginia natives who have become prominent nationally."

"By the early twentieth century, explosions caused by gas and dust accumulations in underground coal mines boomed across the mountains of West Virginia, causing hundreds of deaths. An explosion that shot through the connected Monongah No. 6 and No. 8 mines near Fairmont in 1907 left more than 360 miners dead and rbought about the nation's first federal mine safety regulations. The Monongah blast remains the biggest mine disaster in United States history. Coal miners seeking better pay and safer working conditions through unionization clashed frequently with coal operators during the early 1900s. While union miners relied mainly on work stoppages and intimidation of strikebreakers to boost their cause, coal operators turned to strong-arm detective agencies, hired guns, machine gun-equipped locomotives, and even bomb-dropping aircraft to enforce their will. Coalfield hostilities reached the boiling point in August of 1921, when thousands of well-armed miners marched from Kanawha County to Blair Mountain on the Boone-Logan County line, where an army of mercenaries hired by coal operators awaited them in trenches fortified with machine gun nests. The ensuing Battle of Blair Mountain is considered the largest civil insurrection since the Civil War."

"Persons who have studied the impact of coal mining on different societies from Silesia to northern Japan have usually concluded that coal has been a curse upon the land that yielded it. West Virginia is no exception. In its repetitive cycle of boom and bust, its savage exploitations of men and nature, the coal industry has brought grief and hardship to all but a small proportion of the people whose lives it touched. There has been, of course, a tiny elite of smaller producers and middlemen who grew rich from coal exploitation though not so rich as the nonresident owners in whose shadow the local elite worked. For those West Virginians who lived at a remove from the industry, its impact has been more ambiguous. Certainly coal created opportunities that were not there in the agricultural era, especially as the owners of the industry have always tried and have usually succeeded in passing off the external or social costs of coal production to the public at large. Moreover, the industry called into being a larger population than West Virginia's other economic resources can support so that, even after the great migration of the postwar years, the position of the state is like that of an addict. West Virginia is "hooked" on coal, for better or for worse. In the past it has generally been for the worst."

"Although coal mining was dark, dirty, and dangerous work, many miners enjoyed the unique chore. Some old-timers still reminisce about the close sense of community which united the inhabitants of more than 500 small company towns that were once situated along the Coal Heritage Trail. The road winds past company stores, miners' houses, massive railroad yards, and company towns. Visitors can experience the coal society and heritage that still exists and gain remarkable insight into a unique part of American history."

"Coal- called by ancient Greeks "the rock that burns"- powered the modernization of America. Rich coal-bearing regions like southern West Virginia were transformed in the late nineteenth century into teeming industrial civilizations. The completion of the Chesapeake & Ohio in 1873 and the Norfolk & Western in 1883 opened up the southern West Virginia coalfields. Soon, thousands of coal miners and their families crowded into the rugged river valleys where independent coal operators boldly opened mining ventures. West Virginia's sturdy coal miners came from all over the world. Black Americans from the Deep South joined Eastern European immigrants seeking a better life and poured into the sprawling coal camps which housed the workers. More than 100,000 miners toiled underground in the industry's glory years, laboriously hand loading the "black diamonds" that transformed the United States from a rural nation into an international industrial power. Five billion tons of the world's finest industrial fuel flowed out along the smoothly grated roadbeds of the N&W and the C&O, hauled by the most powerful steam locomotives ever designed."

"We caught a B&O train out of St. Louis for Philadelphia, and it was just our luck that it ran five and a half hours late before we got to Philadelphia. The scenery on our trip was lost to us, because we were covered with dust and roasted too. However I did enjoy winding in and out among the mountains of West Virginia."

"Ask anyone who's been there about West Virginia. It just takes one visit to fall in love with this wild and wonderful state. I fell in love with West Virginia on my first visit and I've been back more than a hundred times. If I don't end up moving there, I'll get back there as often as possible. My father's side of the family has West Virginia roots and I can feel it in my blood every time I cross the state border from my home in Virginia. The West Virginia mountains and the proud people get in your blood and it's a very warm feeling. The number of West Virginia lovers is growing quickly as word spreads about what the state has to offer. Visitors are drawn to incredible natural beauty, a wealth of outdoor recreation opportunities, many historical attractions, an excellent state park system, friendly people, and a simpler and slower-paced way of life."

"He’s going to have to tell the people of West Virginia why he doesn’t want to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing and eyeglasses. I’ve been to West Virginia a number of times, and it’s a great state, beautiful people. But it is a state that is struggling. And he’s going to have to tell the people of West Virginia why he’s rejecting what the scientists of the world are telling us, that we have to act boldly and transform our energy system to protect future generations from the devastation of climate change."

"Coal may have once been king in the Mountaineer State, but tourists are now treated like royalty in West Virginia. Tourism is the second largest industry (behind chemicals) and the fastest-growing segment, as new and old visitors explore the state. Convenient interstate routes in West Virginia make access easier than many driver assume. The exploration possibilities are extensive, but all are within a one-day drive of half the population in the United States. The state's beauty is definitely worth the drive. From friendly cities to rugged mountains, West Virginia is a welcome change. Each region offers its own outdoor and indoor pleasures, but the entire state definitely deserves the nickname, "Almost Heaven.""

"Had West Virginia been nothing more than a mountainous bulwark around which rushed the main currents of American life, its fate would probably have resembled that of Vermont. In fact, Rutherford B. Hayes made this comparison and concluded that there was "Nothing finer in Vermont or New Hampshire" than the western Virginia scenery he enjoyed. If the resemblance had continued to hold, West Virginia would have remained a backwater during the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century but still would have enjoyed two compensating mid-twentieth-century trends: the federal policies and programs that have worked to iron out differences in material standards of living among the various states, and the rise of tourist and recreational industries. Even today, notwithstanding all the violence that has been visited on the landscape, West Virginia's scenery and the recreational potential of its mountains, forests, and streams have proved its most enduring economic resources. Thus for states like Vermont and for those small portions of eastern West Virginia that have nothing but scenery to depend on, modern affluence and aesthetic values may finally break down the barriers that once separated mountain regions from full participation in the nation's economic life."

"West Virginia is the only state spawned by the Civil War, thanks to the efforts of political leaders in the northern and western counties who took issue with Virginia's vote to secede from the Union. Overall, only public sentiment in the land that was to become the thirty-fifth state only slightly favored the federal cause, and a number of counties were decidedly pro-Confederate. Battles, skirmishes, and raids reached every corner of the state, often putting those who were friends, neighbors, and relatives before the war on opposite sides of the killing fields."

"With a background like this, "Almost Heaven" bumper stickers represent a great leap forward. The point is not the merits of specific boasts but their cumulative psychological effect. Perceptive visitors usually see through the disguise right away and conclude, as with defensive individuals who seek to mask a sense of inferiority by boastfulness, that there is something about West Virginia that its citizens are ashamed of. As for West Virginians themselves, this form of indoctrination manages only to persuade most people that there is something phony about history, that it has nothing to do with the reality of their own lives, whereas the opposite is true. In West Virginia history often repeats itself. Perhaps the fact that our history is so painful explains why it is so poorly understood."

"Mountain Mama provides lakes and streams that yield water for drinking and home use, as well as hydroelectric power to light the lights and run the industries. Her waters invite her family to swim, fish, and go boating in hundreds of locations. She makes education available through every kind of school you can think of, from K-12 to colleges and universities- forty-seven of them. Her maternal instinct spoils us with the gorgeous green of summer, the dazzling colors of autumn, and the fresh pastels of spring, but disciplines us with occasional hard winter storms that snow us in and remind us how vulnerable we are. She indulges us with dozens of parks and campgrounds, outdoor festivals of you-name-it, and my goodness, gracious, don't forget the ramp feeds. Last but best, the "mountain" part of her name, rises up out of the deep valleys "with summits bathed in glory like the Prince Emmanuel's land" as the old song puts it. When I stand with others at the foot of the hills in the shadows of an evening and look up at the peaks and pinnacles or hike the summits and gaze out some early morning at the layers of drifting fog caressing the slopes, that is when Mountain Mama really shows her stuff. "Take me home, country roads.""

"Except for christening a few such projects with the names of U.S. presidents, dams are customarily titled after the closest municipality. This, however, did not turn out to be the case with the dam and lake in question. What was dedicated on the spot by President Lyndon Johnson on September 3, 1966 as "Summersville Lake and Dam," did not comply with the usual procedure of labeling such structures... I have imagined being a fly on the wall when officials of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers met to discuss the naming of the big dam in Nicholas County because a rather serious back and forth erupted in the discussion of the proper naming of the dam. A few members of the brain-trust took the side of the small community closest to the project rather than favoring Summersville, the larger more prestigious county seat nearby. Since the byways and buildings of the little hamlet would end up being permanently immersed at the bottom of the lake, it would be most fitting to honor the doomed community by naming the lake and dam after it. The committee's pro-Summersville majority won the final decision largely on the strength of a public relations argument that would protect the future tourist and recreation site from being giggled at by some and abused by ridicule from others. It would also avoid predictable jibs and jeering in the media. The community closest to the project, you see, was the unincorporated town of Gad. Today, there exists only in imaginative speculation what might have resulted if the widely known magnificent structure had been named "Gad Dam"."

"One of the most devastating chapters in the chronicles of Appalachian history reveals that it was not only states that were divided by the sword, but families in the border states were also split down the middle between the Blue and Gray. A study by James Carter Linger estimates that nearly 22,000 recruits from what is now West Virginia fought for the Confederacy. If we accept the generally quoted figure that 32,000 men from West Virginia fought for the Union, this ratio of 32,000 to 22,000 shows plainly that loyalties of the Mountain State counties were not as unbalanced in favor of the Union as was once thought. West Virginia is the only state born out of the Civil War, but its allegiances were severely divided by the conflict."

"I can name hundreds of unincorporated towns that have risen and fallen at the whims of industry or major highway relocation. Communities that were once bustling, thriving places take a huge hit in an already not-so-huge population, when mining operations or nearby factories close down or when newly constructed superhighways re-route the main traffic which formerly streamed through town. Boarded-up stores, empty or deteriorating houses, and abandoned school buildings reveal glaring evidence that what once was, is no more. In a lot of little places nobody gathers at the Dairy Queen on the main drag or congregates at the truck stop or scads of former hang-out locations. They went bust. Too few people are still around to congregate, even in the church buildings. Aside from the sad fact of the population decline, downsizing what was not big in size in the first place, some little-known but much-loved settlements have hung in there and still bloom where they were planted."

"If you have never set foot in my home state and we happen to make one another's acquaintance, perhaps in a plane or in a national park or while standing in line at Disneyworld, and I tell you I'm from West Virginia, please don't ask me if I live near Richmond. Don't inform me, "Oh, I have a friend whose hometown is Newport News." Many of you who are reading this book are probably aware of what I'm about to say, but I'll say it anyway. If you have ever hung your hat in the "Mountain State" a sense of duty springs up within you, when the occasion calls for it, to inform anybody, or everybody- tactfully and politely, of course there is a WEST- by God- Virginia."

"I've passed through a place in Roane County that lies along West Virginia Route 36 southeast of the city of Spencer, which is named Left Hand, but why there isn't a town called Right Hand somewhere nearby beats me. It's as big a mystery as finding out which is the true Hollywood we hear so much about and which is the impostor, the one in Monroe County or its competitor in Raleigh County. (There are rumors that a third Hollywood exists in Los Angeles County, California, but don't believe everything you hear.) Oh, and don't get Foster mixed up with Fosterville. Try not to confuse Frame with Frametown and don't think you're losing your mind if you drive through four different Stringtowns."