Jennifer Ritterhouse (GMU): Dixie Destinations: Rereading Jonathan Daniels' A Southerner Discovers the South. As home to America’s id, New Jersey’s pop-culture landscape has mutated, peaking with The Sopranos, then regressing into the Reality TV mud of Real Housewives and Jersey Shore; with Boardwalk Empire, HBO reaches further back, into the state’s proud, bullet-laced past. Size Matters: An article on small towns with big things. New England’s hidden history: More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery (and more). From Main Street News, an article on Bonaparte, Iowa: The Little Town That Could. Gangs of LA: All conflict tends towards binarity, be it on the chess board, in the political arena or on the mean streets of Los Angeles. Detroit’s decades-long collapse has left wide-open spaces for all sorts of possibility to flourish; it’s not exactly anarchy, but the place doesn’t operate by the rules of a normal American city. The small Nevada town of Battle Mountain has embraced its designation as the "Armpit of America" with an Old Spice-sponsored festival. The United States of Star Wars assigns a planet from the Star Wars universe to each state, which then illustrated appropriately. From Texas Monthly, a look at the history of Texas (according to Wikipedia). A review of Banktown: The Rise and Struggles of Charlotte's Big Banks by Rick Rothacker. How can the United States of America pretend to lead the fight against global money laundering given the "business" of Delaware? There’s a strange phenomenon in Los Angeles: the Betty Boop phenomenon. Worlds away from what we see on Jersey Shore, HBO's Boardwalk Empire has reignited interest in New Jersey history and culture: An interview with Bryant Simon, author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America. A look at some real world superheroes of the South. Rhode Island will vote on whether to drop "Plantations" from its name. Choire Sicha on America's top ten least pageview-garnering cities.
