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roamanddiscover · 1 year ago

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South Carolina

South Carolina, located in the southeastern region of the United States, is a state rich in history, culture, and natural beauty. The state is bordered by Georgia to the south and North Carolina to the north, with the Atlantic Ocean on its eastern coast. Known for its beautiful beaches, stunning landscapes, and historic landmarks, South Carolina is a popular tourist destination for people from all over the world. The state's name is derived from the Latin word "Carolus," meaning Charles in English, in honor of King Charles I of England. South Carolina was one of the original 13 colonies that declared independence from Great Britain and played a significant role in the American Revolution. South Carolina's unique geology is a mix of coastal plains, rolling hills, and mountains. The state is home to several scenic lakes, rivers, and waterfalls, including Lake Marion, Lake Moultrie, and the Reedy River Falls. The geography of South Carolina is divided into three distinct regions: the Coastal Plain, the Piedmont Plateau, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Coastal Plain is in the southeastern part of the state and consists of flat, sandy terrain near the coast and fertile soil further inland. The Piedmont Plateau lies in the central part of the state and is characterized by hilly terrain and forests. The Blue Ridge Mountains are located in the northwestern part of the state and are known for their stunning views and hiking trails. The state's ecology is incredibly diverse, with a variety of plant and animal species. The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources oversees the state's natural resources, including wildlife conservation and habitat protection. Visitors can see everything from alligators in the swamps to dolphins off the coast. South Carolina has a humid subtropical climate, with mild winters and hot, humid summers. The state is known for occasional hurricanes and tropical storms that can bring heavy rainfall and strong winds. - Endangered species in South Carolina include the Carolina Heelsplitter, a freshwater mussel, and the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker, an endangered bird species. - South Carolina is the only state in the United States that produces tea. The Charleston Tea Plantation on Wadmalaw Island produces tea under the American Classic Tea brand. - The state's official dance is the shag, a popular dance style that originated in beach clubs along the Grand Strand during the 1940s. South Carolina has something to offer for everyone, from its deep historical roots to its beautiful landscapes and exciting activities. It's no wonder why so many people choose to call this state their home or travel here for unforgettable experiences.

Etymology

South Carolina derives its name from King Charles I of England, who granted the land to eight Lords Proprietors in 1663. The name "Carolina" originates from the Latin word "Carolus" meaning "Charles." At first, the land was divided between North and South Carolina, but they were combined as one colony before separating again in the late 1600s. The roots of South Carolina's name go even further back than the English monarchy, however. The native tribes who inhabited the area before European contact had their own names for the region. The Cherokee people called it "Kuwa" meaning "pitch tree place," while the Cusabo people named it "Essaw" meaning "standing fish." South Carolina has a diverse cultural history, and its name is just one example of the many influences that have shaped it. From the native tribes to the English monarchy to modern-day influences, South Carolina's past and present are reflected in its name.

History

South Carolina is a state with a rich and complex history, spanning from the colonial period to the present day. The state was originally home to many Native American tribes, including the Cherokee and Catawba, before European settlers arrived in the region in the 16th century. The first permanent settlement in South Carolina was founded by the English in 1670, at Charleston. The colony grew rapidly over the following decades, fueled by the cultivation of rice and indigo by enslaved African Americans. In addition to plantation agriculture, South Carolina's early economy was also shaped by trade and commerce. The state was a major hub for the transatlantic slave trade, as well as for the export of goods such as naval stores, lumber, and deerskins. During the Revolutionary War, South Carolina played a pivotal role in the American victory against British rule. The state saw many decisive battles, including the Battle of Charleston in 1780 and the Battle of Cowpens in 1781. The Civil War had a significant impact on South Carolina, which was one of the first states to secede from the Union in 1860. The war wreaked havoc on the state, with many battles fought on its soil and the widespread destruction of property and infrastructure. Following the Civil War, South Carolina underwent a period of Reconstruction, during which federal troops occupied the state and sought to rebuild its shattered economy and society. However, this period was marked by violence and upheaval, as white Southerners sought to maintain their dominance over freed Black Americans. In the 20th century, South Carolina continued to play an important role in American history. The state was a center of the civil rights movement, with many prominent activists, such as Septima Clark and Modjeska Simkins, working to advance racial equality and justice. Today, South Carolina is a modern, vibrant state that is proud of its heritage and history. The state's rich past is reflected in its many historic sites and museums, including Fort Sumter National Monument, which tells the story of the start of the Civil War, and the Charleston Museum, which houses a wide range of artifacts related to the state's history and culture. South Carolina's history is a fascinating and diverse tapestry, shaped by many different people and events over the centuries. Whether you are interested in colonial settlements, the Civil War, or the civil rights movement, there is something for everyone to discover in this dynamic and beautiful state.

Geology

South Carolina boasts diverse geological formations and landscapes that showcase the state's natural beauty. Some of the notable geological features in South Carolina include the Appalachian Mountains in the northwest and the coastal plain in the southeast. The Appalachian Mountains, extending to South Carolina from Canada, consist of various rock types like granite, gneiss and slate. The Appalachian Mountains run parallel to the state's northwest, creating steep ridges and valleys in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The highest peak in the state, Sassafras Mountain, is situated in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with a summit elevation of 3,553 feet. The Middle and Great Appalachian Mountains are characterized by numerous faults that caused earthquakes in the past. On the other hand, the Coastal Plain, extending across the southeastern parts of South Carolina, is home to swamps, sandy beaches, wetlands, and barrier islands. The region was created by the deposition of sediment from rivers that flowed from the Appalachian Mountains over millions of years. The sediments, which consist of sand, silt, and clay, were compressed over time to form the layers of sandstone, limestone, and shale that are found in the Coastal Plain. The Grand Strand in Myrtle Beach is an attraction for people from all around the world, with more than 60 miles of wide, white sand beaches. In addition to these formations, the Midlands region of South Carolina is home to a geological feature known as the fall line which separates the piedmont region from the coastal plain. The fall line comprises a series of waterfalls and rapids that create a natural boundary along major rivers. Rivers including the Broad, Saluda, Catawba, and Congaree rivers flow over the fall line, creating numerous waterfalls like Congaree and Broad rivers. The state has several more geological attractions, including caves, sinkholes, and dinosaur tracks, that showcase the natural beauty and diversity of South Carolina's landscapes. As a result of these features, South Carolina remains a popular destination throughout the year, attracting millions of tourists who come to explore the geological formations and landscapes.

Geography

Geographically, South Carolina is a diverse state with several distinct regions. The state is located in the southeastern part of the United States and shares borders with Georgia to the south and North Carolina to the north. It has a total area of 32,020 square miles and is the 40th largest state in the U.S. The state is divided into three geographic regions: the Coastal Plain (also known as the Lowcountry), the Piedmont Plateau (the Upstate), and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Coastal Plain covers the eastern part of the state and includes the coastal areas and barrier islands. It is relatively flat and has an elevation of fewer than 500 feet above sea level. The Piedmont Plateau, a hilly region, encompasses the central part of the state and forms a transition zone between the Coastal Plain and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The majority of the state's population resides in this region. It has an elevation of up to 1,500 feet above sea level and is known for its numerous rivers, including the Saluda, Broad, and Catawba. The Blue Ridge Mountains, located in the western corner of the state, are part of the Appalachian Mountain range and are known for their stunning peaks and breathtaking scenery. The tallest peak in South Carolina, Sassafras Mountain, is located in this region and rises 3,554 feet above sea level. South Carolina is home to several large lakes, including Lake Marion, Lake Moultrie, and Lake Hartwell. The state also has several major rivers such as the Savannah, Pee Dee, and Edisto. In addition to its natural features, South Carolina has many man-made elements, such as dams, bridges, and highways. The state has an extensive transportation system that includes several major highways, international airports, and ports. South Carolina's diverse geography and physical features make it an exciting place to live, work, and visit. Whether you prefer to explore the beaches, hike the mountains, or simply enjoy the rolling hills of the Piedmont, there is something for everyone in this beautiful state.

Ecology

South Carolina's ecology is diverse, with varied wildlife and ecosystems in different regions. From the coastal areas to the mountains, South Carolina is home to unique habitats and species. The state's coastal region includes salt marshes, barrier islands, and beaches. These areas provide critical habitat for shorebirds, sea turtles, and fish species, such as red drum and king mackerel. The ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge is home to diverse wildlife, including alligators, bald eagles, and otters. Inland, the state's forests are home to wildlife such as black bears, deer, and wild turkeys. The Congaree National Park, located in the central part of the state, features one of the largest intact old-growth bottomland hardwood forests in the southeastern United States. It is also home to numerous plant and animal species, including the endangered swallow-tailed kite and wood storks. The Upstate region of South Carolina hosts the Appalachian Mountains and several rivers. The mountain landscape features rare plant and animal species such as the green salamander and the peregrine falcon. The rivers provide habitat for fish species such as the brown trout and the striped bass. South Carolina's aquatic ecosystems, including rivers, lakes, and estuaries, are home to a wide variety of fish and other aquatic species. The Santee Cooper Lakes in the central part of the state provide habitat for striped bass, catfish, and other fish species, while the Chattooga River in the Upstate region is known for its trout fishing opportunities. The state's estuaries, such as the North Inlet-Winyah Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, are important nursery habitats for a variety of fish and shellfish species. Endangered species are also present in South Carolina. These include the red-cockaded woodpecker, the Carolina heelsplitter mussel, and the Eastern indigo snake. The state government, along with conservation organizations, works to protect and manage endangered species and their habitats. South Carolina's diverse ecosystems and wildlife provide numerous opportunities for wildlife viewing, outdoor recreation, and conservation efforts.

Biodiversity

South Carolina is home to a rich diversity of plant and animal species. The state's numerous ecosystems, ranging from the high mountains in the west to the sandy beaches in the east, provide habitats for a multitude of unique organisms. The biodiversity of South Carolina is one of its many draws for nature enthusiasts. One of the most iconic species found in South Carolina is the American alligator. These large reptiles can be found in most of the state's freshwater habitats, from swamps to rivers to lakes. Other reptiles found in South Carolina include the venomous copperhead snake and the eastern diamondback rattlesnake. Mammals native to South Carolina include the white-tailed deer, black bear, and bobcat. The state is also home to several species of bats, including the federally endangered Indiana bat. The birdlife of South Carolina is particularly diverse, with over 400 species recorded in the state. One notable bird is the painted bunting, a colorful species commonly found in the Lowcountry. Other species include the red-cockaded woodpecker, a bird of the longleaf pine forests, and the swallow-tailed kite, a raptor that preys on insects. South Carolina's coastal habitats provide nesting grounds for several species of sea turtles, including the loggerhead, green, and Kemp's ridley turtles. The state's beaches are also popular nesting sites for several species of shorebirds, including the black skimmer and the least tern. South Carolina's diverse forests and wetlands are home to a wide variety of plant species, including many rare and threatened species. Longleaf pine forests in the coastal plain are home to plants such as the Venus flytrap and the pitcher plant. The Appalachian Mountains in the western part of the state support a diverse array of plant life, including the mountain laurel and the Fraser fir. In addition to its native species, South Carolina is also home to many non-native, or invasive, species. These include the Chinese tallow tree, which crowds out native vegetation, and the European starling, which competes with native bird species for resources. Conservation efforts in South Carolina aim to protect the state's biodiversity by preserving critical habitats and controlling invasive species. Organizations such as the South Carolina Wildlife Federation work to promote sustainable land use practices and educate the public about the importance of protecting wildlife and ecosystems. Through these efforts, South Carolina's unique biodiversity can be enjoyed for generations to come.

eastern diamondback rattlesnake

Climate

South Carolina experiences a humid subtropical climate, with hot summers and mild winters. However, due to its diverse topography and geographic location, the state experiences a wide range of weather patterns and climate variations. The coastal region of South Carolina is influenced by the Atlantic Ocean and experiences a mild, pleasant climate throughout the year. Summers are hot, with temperatures averaging around 90°F, while winters are mild, with temperatures rarely dropping below freezing. The upstate region of South Carolina experiences a humid subtropical climate, with hot summers and cool winters. While summers can be quite hot and humid, winters can be chilly with occasional snowfall. The mountainous regions of South Carolina, on the other hand, experience a highland climate with cooler temperatures. Summers are mild with temperatures averaging around 70°F, while winters can be cold with significant snowfall. The state is also prone to severe weather events, including thunderstorms, tornadoes and hurricanes. The hurricane season in South Carolina lasts from June through November. The state experiences an average of two hurricanes per year, with Hurricane Hugo being one of the most devastating hurricanes in the state's history. South Carolina's location on the eastern seaboard, combined with its varied topography, makes it vulnerable to storms and natural disasters, including flooding and severe thunderstorms. The state has implemented various measures to manage the risks associated with these weather events, including evacuation plans and building regulations. If you're planning a trip to South Carolina, it's important to be prepared for the weather changes and fluctuations that the state experiences. Bring lightweight, comfortable clothing for the summer months and be sure to pack warm clothing and layers for the cooler winter months. Always check the weather forecast before traveling and be aware of the potential risks of severe weather events.

Environmental Issues

South Carolina has a range of environmental issues that threaten the state's natural beauty and biodiversity. One of the most significant challenges is air pollution, which has a severe impact on the health of people and wildlife. South Carolina's industrial activities, power plants, and transportation systems are the primary sources of air pollution. The state has taken several measures to reduce air pollution, such as emission standards for vehicles and power plants and offering incentives for using cleaner energy sources. Another environmental concern in South Carolina is water pollution. The state's waterways are often contaminated with pesticides, fertilizers, and industrial runoff, causing harm to aquatic life. In response, the state government and non-profit organizations have implemented measures like the South Carolina Adopt-a-Stream program, which aims to maintain the state's water quality by encouraging citizen involvement. South Carolina is also vulnerable to natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. These disasters have a significant impact on the environment, leading to soil erosion, habitat degradation, and loss of biodiversity. However, South Carolina has developed a robust emergency management system to respond to these challenges. Moreover, the state government has introduced measures to mitigate climate change, like incentives for renewable energy, energy-efficient buildings, and transportation systems. Agriculture is a vital industry in South Carolina, but it can also have a negative impact on the environment. The excessive use of fertilizer and pesticides often leads to soil erosion and contamination of waterways. Read the full article

#NorthAmericaTours #SouthCarolinatours #SouthCarolinaTravel #TravelTheWorld #visitSouthCarolina

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servin-up-surveys · 1 year ago

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survey #176

Do you think you could handle a job in the medical field? Why or why not? No. I could never handle a patient dying, and there's also a lot of gross stuff I don't want to see.

What is one electronic device you own that you have not used in a long time? A Nintendo DS Lite.

Do you prefer to play chess or checkers? I only know how to play checkers.

If you had to go an entire week without using any technology, what do you think you would spend most of your time doing instead? Reading, drawing, writing, probably exercising extra. I'm sure I'd be way, way more productive...

Would you rather travel to Asia or France? Asia, I think.

Do you prefer dark, brown or white chocolate? My preference is milk chocolate, but I also do enjoy dark. There are very few cases where I've liked white chocolate, it's too sweet.

Would you rather visit Australia, Germany, Croatia, or Jamaica? I fully intend to visit Germany at least once.

Would you prefer a pet rat, mouse, snake, lizard or spider? If I could only pick one to have period, snake. At this moment though, like what I most want to add to my family now, is a tarantula, either a Brazilian black or skeleton leg.

Have you ever fallen into a hole or crevice whilst hiking? I've never even been hiking.

A romantic meal, a trip to a theme park, or go to a concert? In general I'd prefer to go to a concert as a date, however Girt actually doesn't enjoy concerts so I wouldn't drag him to one. With him, I'll take the theme park, when my legs are a-okay.

How often do you wear necklaces? Basically never because all the ones I have start to bother my skin really quick/turn it greenish. I want a necklace I can keep on so bad, I really love how they look. If I'm putting any of my necklaces on now, it's for going out somewhere.

Would you rather wear a bracelet or a necklace? Necklaces, I actually don't like bracelets for the same reason I don't like long-sleeved shirts that thin out/get stretchy at the ends (I know that is so specific and you probably have no idea what I'm talking about), I don't at all like feeling something tight-ish around my wrists. I'm the same about pants that only reach my ankles.

When was the last time you had a donut? Maybe like, a month ago. Or more.

What’s your favorite song by Miley Cyrus? I genuinely do love "The Climb."

Who do you absolutely adore? My boyfriend and his immediate family, my own mom, nieces and nephew, Mazzy, and Tez. I care about more people, but as far as "adore" goes, it's them.

Have you ever had a crush on a kinda-country boy? lol no, I don't think I've ever been romantically attracted to a notably "country" guy.

Do you care about any of your exes at all? I care most about Jason, but no longer in a romantic sort of way. Of course I still feel some amount of softness towards Sara, but I can't truthfully say I "care" about her anymore. I just have nostalgia with her.

Who last slapped your butt? Probably my friend Chelsea, we used to be really close when I was still friends with her sister, and we were sexually playful with each other in a completely "just joking" kind of way, neither of us actually felt anything romantic. She's married with a kid now.

Where have you lived throughout your life? The same general area of eastern North Carolina, near the coastal plain/Piedmont divide.

What kind of cake did you have for your last birthday? I actually didn't want a cake, we got donuts instead.

Have you ever had a panic attack? Many. I'm more prone to anxiety attacks, but panic attacks have definitely happened.

Anyone’s birthday coming up soon? Yes, my mom's at the start of next month and my nephew's in the middle of August.

When at a restaurant, do you put your napkin on your lap? I probably would if it was messy food.

Do you prefer electric or manual pencil sharpeners? Electric.

Are your biceps at all noticeable? lol no

When are you moving next? I don't know. It's looking to be very possible that our landlord will be selling this house and getting us into another somehow, things are very uncertain right now, and if that doesn't happen it will probably be whenever Girt and I hopefully move in together.

Have you ever had a bad concert experience? No.

Have you ever carried a concealed weapon? No.

Do you call your boyfriend “Monkey”? I've seen this question appear in so many surveys over all the years and I have never understood why, I know literally nobody who does this.

Would you rather go to Greece or France? Greece.

How would you spend a day at the beach? At this moment I wouldn't go to the beach, not until my legs are stronger; the last time I visited the beach, my muscle atrophy was kinda early on, and I struggled VERY BADLY walking in the sand. While great progress has been made, I just don't think I'm ready to where I'd be able to enjoy the experience. But anyway, to answer the question in general, I tend to stay in the water; I hate the feeling of sand but love being in the ocean. I'm sure we'd bring a tent thing for shade, so I'd probably sit under that with the people I'm with, maybe have some snacks or read. I'd definitely bring my camera to try to get some nice pictures. Hopefully one day soon I CAN go on a vacation like this and not be in torment lol.

Have you ever experienced altitude sickness? No. Like everyone though I've definitely experienced the ear popping in planes and even when driving through mountains.

Was the last show you watched a re-run? Not for me, no; Ma and I were watching Deadliest Catch, some of the first season. She's seen it at some point.

What’s your biggest priority right now? Improving my physical health, I think. I've gotten too far to let it start slipping again.

What does it feel like to fall asleep in someone’s arms? If I'm not hot, I absolutely love it. In the spooning sense anyway lol, if we're PROPERLY lying down so we're actually comfortable, I am such a cuddlebug. If I'm sitting up in some way, then I'm uncomfortable/am gonna wake up feeling like death lol.

Do you recall the first time that you learned the truth about sex? 5th grade, sex ed/"family life" classes. I feel like a rare exception where my parents actually never taught me about this stuff, so my education on it was very aggressively abstinence-based and made HIV/AIDS sound like a total death sentence that you'd contract from your very first pre-marital intercourse. I am very unhappy with how I was taught about my own body parts and men's, like there is still probably so much stuff I don't know and it's honestly pretty embarrassing.

Do you need the opinion of others to make yourself feel worthwhile? uh... admittedly, right now, yes. I am very, very bad about needing external validation, because otherwise I'm convinced I'm an awful person who shouldn't treasure herself. This is a very major problem with me that I'm still trying to fix.

Have you ever rubbed anyone’s feet? ugh ew no, I hate feet

What is one thing you fantasize or daydream about doing? Being able to support myself with nature photography, going all over the world seeing amazing things...

What would you rather: lethal injection, electric chair, or hanging? Lethal injection sounds by far the least painful... I'd think. I guess I don't know exactly what the body experiences during these.

Have you taken someone's virginity? No.

What would you say if the person you love/like kissed another girl/boy? I'd be pretty fucking pissed off, especially when one of his relationship dealbreakers is cheating, so wouldn't that be ironic. I'd break up with him immediately and probably stop talking to him. Wow I don't like this question, even when I have full trust in him to never do this.

Does the person you have feelings for right now, know you do? lmfao yes he's very aware

Why did you kiss the last person you kissed? He was leaving to go home.

Did you hug/kiss one of your parents today? No.

Who would you like to see in concert? Rammstein is fucking obviously #1 lol, even before I was super super into them I woulda gone because their concerts are very highly praised. I'd also really like to go with my mom to a Metallica concert (she would fucking die), as well as In This Moment, who she also likes a whole lot. I would include Ozzy here, but he seems to be done touring and probably should be with his health state. There are plenty of other bands I'd go see, I really like concerts, but those are the immediate, strong answers for me.

Who was the first person to ever ask you out? I think one of the boys that harassed me in pre-k, but honestly I don't even know if we knew what "asking out" was yet, there were just two boys who would chase and try to kiss me during recess.

What's one thing your partner must be able to accept about you? Sometimes I need time to myself, and also that I'm a mentally ill person that is not always going to be in happy shape.

Are there any videos of yourself on YouTube? No, not to my memory. Certainly not on my current account.

What’s one thing that’s annoying you about the book you’re reading now? It doesn't majorly annoy me, but Sutherland has a very strong habit of overusing separating paragraphs for emphasis, in my opinion. She's slightly more dramatic than I prefer in reading.

Do you have trouble letting friends go when you need to? YUP SURE FUCKIN DO

If you had a daughter, would you allow sleepovers? I'm going to guess you're implying her sleeping over with a boy, because obviously I'd allow her female friends to????? I probably would allow sleepovers with a boy she's actually dating only once she hits 16; I know what I did at 16 with my boyfriend, and I was abstinent then, I'm not inviting my teenage daughter to get pregnant if we can avoid it. I also include the fact they'd better be actually, officially dating because I'd likely wring a fucker's neck if he tried to lead my daughter on by never committing.

Which do you like better, your first name or your middle name? My first, I'm thankful I actually like my first name lol. My middle name is pretty imo, but it is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO common.

Where is your brother? He lives in Tennessee, but I actually don't think he's there right now; he's been traveling the country doing track races in I think he's aiming for every state.

Do you like using terms of endearment? Yes, I am extremely verbally affectionate.

Do you have any plans for tomorrow? Yeah, Girt's gonna be coming over.

What's the longest movie you've ever seen? I THINK Troy, but I'm unsure. I don't generally like super long movies, by like around two hours I'm done.

What was the last thing you wrote down in the notes app on your phone? I have one list of drawing ideas, and I added something to that.

Would you ever want to visit South Korea? Nah, I'm not particularly interested.

#survey #surveys #random questions #personal questions #questionnaire

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whfarms · 2 years ago

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Where is Hemp Grown in NC?

Hemp is grown in various regions of North Carolina (NC). Since the legalization of industrial hemp cultivation in 2015, the state has become one of the leading hemp producers in the United States. Hemp cultivation occurs in multiple counties across NC, with some regions being more prominent for hemp farming. However, it's important to note that specific farms like WH Farms and locations may change over time as the industry evolves. WH Farms is one of the top hemp farms in NC which provides CBD Business Launch Kits and CBD Business Launch Payment Plans as well to expand their business.

Some of the regions in North Carolina known for hemp cultivation with CBD Business Launch Kit include:

Western North Carolina: Counties such as Buncombe, Henderson, Madison, and Haywood have seen significant hemp cultivation or hemp farm in NC due to their favorable climate and agricultural heritage.

Piedmont Region: Counties like Franklin, Forsyth, Guilford, and Rockingham have seen an increase in hemp farming due to their proximity to larger urban centers and transportation networks.

Eastern North Carolina: Counties in the eastern part of the state, such as Pitt, Johnston, Sampson, and Wilson, have also become hubs for hemp cultivation. The region's rich agricultural history and fertile soil make it suitable for hemp farming.

These are just a few examples of regions where hemp is grown in North Carolina for hemp business services. However, hemp farming has expanded throughout the state, and you may find hemp cultivation operations in other counties as well. If you are looking for specific farms or detailed information about hemp cultivation in a particular area of North Carolina, it would be best to consult local agricultural authorities, hemp associations, or contact the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services for the most up-to-date information like:

· Where is Hemp Grown in NC?

· How do I get certified to sell CBD?

#medical #cannabis #CBD #health #herbs #hemp #herb #medicine

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bunkershotgolf · 3 years ago

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The Highland Course at Primland Rises to No. 28 in Golf Digest’s “America’s 100 Greatest” List

Golf Amenity at Luxury Resort in Blue Ridge Mountains Stands Out Among 13,500 U.S. Public Venues

The numbers are in from Golf Digest course raters, and The Highland Course at Primland, Auberge Resorts Collection, has climbed to No. 28 in the esteemed publication’s biennial compilation - “America’s 100 Greatest of Public Courses, 2021-2022.”

Located within the luxury resort’s 12,000 pristine Blue Ridge Mountains in SW Virginia near the North Carolina Border, The Highland Course is revered for its spectacular conditions, scintillating views and a Donald Steel-designed layout that challenges golfers of all levels. Unfurling amid the lush, serene, vast and pristine landscape, the course is the highest-ranked Virginia layout in the newly released list and the only one from the Commonwealth to land in the top 30.

To derive this list of remarkable courses, hundreds of Golf Digest panelists submit detailed reviews for thousands of courses, rating them in seven categories: shot values, design variety, memorability, aesthetics, resistance to scoring, conditioning and ambience.

“Our guests frequently rave about the long-range vistas, wonderful course layout, and magnificent playing conditions,” said Brian Alley, PGA, Primland’s Director of Golf and Recreation. “This distinction from Golf Digest’s expert course panelists is a wonderful honor and reinforces our guests’ appraisal of The Highland Course.”

Golfers can book a variety of experiences at Primland with individual rounds, golf school instruction, packages, group events and more. There is also a wide array of after-golf activities and amenities at Primland, such as horseback riding, fly fishing, alfresco yoga and meditation, full-service spa, hiking, sporting clays, RTV trail riding, and stargazing in one of the largest observatories in the Eastern U.S.

The resort offers unique lodging options, including chalet-like Pinnacle Cottages, golf course Fairway Cottages, tree houses perched on the edge of the mountains and luxurious guest rooms and suites at The Lodge.

Primland, Auberge Resorts Collection is conveniently located two hours from Charlotte, five hours from Washington D.C, and just 90 minutes from two regional airports, Piedmont Triad (PTI) in Greensboro and Roanoke Regional. The resort’s partnership with NetJets provides guests with special benefits when flying privately through two nearby airports, Blue Ridge and Mt. Airy-Surry County, only 45 minutes away. The property also features a helipad located at the North Gate.

Primland, Auberge Resorts Collection is now accepting reservations. For more information, please visit aubergeresorts.com/primland.

About Primland, Auberge Resorts Collection

Primland, Auberge Resorts Collection resonates with people who immerse themselves in luxurious elegance whenever possible. Value Mother Nature’s masterworks. Celebrate the scintillating moments when fish take the bait. Cherish the soothing serenity of golden mountain sunsets. Rush with adrenalin while traversing RTV trails. Feel child-like wonder while stargazing through a professional-grade telescope. Embrace treehouse lodging perches with panoramic views. Relish playing an award-winning golf course. Rejuvenate through caressing spa treatments. And covet organic ingredients served tastefully in farm-to-table culinary dishes.

For more information, please visit aubergeresorts.com/primland/

Connect with Primland, Auberge Resorts Collection on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

About Auberge Resorts Collection

Auberge Resorts Collection is a portfolio of extraordinary hotels, resorts, residences and private clubs. While each property is unique, all share a crafted approach to luxury and bring the soul of the locale to life through captivating design, exceptional cuisine, innovative spas and gracious yet unobtrusive service. With 19 hotels and resorts across three continents and eight new hotels under development, Auberge invites guests to create unforgettable stories in some of the world’s most desirable destinations.

For more information: aubergeresorts.com

Connect with Auberge Resorts Collection on Facebook Twitter and Instagram @AubergeResorts and #AlwaysAuberge

#golf #Golf Courses #submission

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catdotjpeg · 3 years ago

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On the... National Day of Mourning, we’re reflecting on what solidarity with Indigenous peoples looks like as a funder in this country. Beyond land acknowledgements, we’re paying rent. Indigenous peoples’ funds, such as the Manna-hatta Fund, Shuumi Land Tax, and Real Rent Duwamish, have asked settlers and non-Indigenous folks to pay rent to Indigenous people across the country. Paying rent is a small yet critical way to both acknowledge Native land theft and support the self-determination of Indigenous communities. Philanthropy has historically disinvested from Native-led movements as part of the continued erasure and genocidal project of settler-colonialism. As we work our way toward the recommended contribution amount of 2.4% of operating budgets for nonprofits, we’re committed to paying rent where our staff of sixteen are based, including Chi-Nations Youth Council, Manna-hatta Fund, Monacan Indian Nation, Piedmont American Indian Association Lower Eastern Cherokee Nation of South Carolina, Lenape Nation of PA, Pueblo Action Alliance, and Real Rent Duwamish. Today and everyday we thank the Canarsie Lenape, Lenni Lenape, Wappinger, Waccamaw, Anishinaabek, Niswi-mishkodewin (Council of the Three Fires): Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, Tewa, Cherokee, Duwamish, and Powhatan Peoples for living and working on their land.

ID: The illustration by Bianca Dunn for Manna-hatta Fund depicts a group of five people of varying genders and ages, including one infant, sitting on the stoop of a brownstone having a conversation. The text reads, "Native people are still here." A link to mannahattafund.org is included on the bottom.

-- Third Wave Fund, 24 Nov 2021

#national day of mourning #indigenous #indigenous sovereignty #new york city #bay area

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brookstonalmanac · 1 year ago

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Events 7.19 (after 1900)

1903 – Maurice Garin wins the first Tour de France. 1916 – World War I: Battle of Fromelles: British and Australian troops attack German trenches as part of the Battle of the Somme. 1934 – The rigid airship USS Macon surprised the USS Houston near Clipperton Island with a mail delivery for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, demonstrating its potential for tracking ships at sea. 1936 – Spanish Civil War: The CNT and UGT call a general strike in Spain – mobilizing workers' militias against the Nationalist forces. 1940 – World War II: Battle of Cape Spada: The Royal Navy and the Regia Marina clash; the Italian light cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni sinks, with 121 casualties. 1940 – Field Marshal Ceremony: First occasion in World War II that Adolf Hitler appoints field marshals due to military achievements. 1940 – World War II: Army order 112 forms the Intelligence Corps of the British Army. 1942 – World War II: The Second Happy Time of Hitler's submarines comes to an end, as the increasingly effective American convoy system compels them to return to the central Atlantic. 1943 – World War II: Rome is heavily bombed by more than 500 Allied aircraft, inflicting thousands of casualties. 1947 – Prime Minister of the shadow Burmese government, Bogyoke Aung San and eight others are assassinated. 1947 – Korean politician Lyuh Woon-hyung is assassinated. 1952 – Opening of the Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. 1957 – The largely autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh was published. 1961 – Tunisia imposes a blockade on the French naval base at Bizerte; the French would capture the entire town four days later. 1963 – Joe Walker flies a North American X-15 to a record altitude of 106,010 meters (347,800 feet) on X-15 Flight 90. Exceeding an altitude of 100 km, this flight qualifies as a human spaceflight under international convention. 1964 – Vietnam War: At a rally in Saigon, South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Khánh calls for expanding the war into North Vietnam. 1967 – Piedmont Airlines Flight 22, a Piedmont Airlines Boeing 727-22 and a twin-engine Cessna 310 collided over Hendersonville, North Carolina, USA. Both aircraft were destroyed and all passengers and crew were killed, including John T. McNaughton, an advisor to Robert McNamara. 1969 – Chappaquiddick incident: U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy crashes his car into a tidal pond at Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, killing his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. 1976 – Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal is created. 1977 – The world's first Global Positioning System (GPS) signal was transmitted from Navigation Technology Satellite 2 (NTS-2) and received at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at 12:41 a.m. Eastern time (ET). 1979 – The Sandinista rebels overthrow the government of the Somoza family in Nicaragua. 1979 – The oil tanker SS Atlantic Empress collides with another oil tanker, causing the largest ever ship-borne oil spill. 1980 – Opening of the Summer Olympics in Moscow. 1981 – In a private meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, French President François Mitterrand reveals the existence of the Farewell Dossier, a collection of documents showing the Soviet Union had been stealing American technological research and development. 1982 – In one of the first militant attacks by Hezbollah, David S. Dodge, president of the American University of Beirut, is kidnapped. 1983 – The first three-dimensional reconstruction of a human head in a CT is published. 1985 – The Val di Stava dam collapses killing 268 people in Val di Stava, Italy. 1992 – A car bomb kills Judge Paolo Borsellino and five members of his escort. 1997 – The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army resumes a ceasefire to end their 25-year paramilitary campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland. 2018 – The Knesset passes the controversial Nationality Bill, which defines the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

#Events

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96thdayofrage · 4 years ago

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A beautiful late April day, seventy-two years after slavery ended in the United States. Claude Anderson parks his car on the side of Holbrook Street in Danville. On the porch of number 513, he rearranges the notepads under his arm. Releasing his breath in a rush of decision, he steps up to the door of the handmade house and knocks.

Danville is on the western edge of the Virginia Piedmont. Back in 1865, it had been the last capital of the Confederacy. Or so Jefferson Davis had proclaimed on April 3, after he fled Richmond. Davis stayed a week, but then he had to keep running. The blue-coated soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were hot on his trail. When they got to Danville, they didn’t find the fugitive rebel. But they did discover hundreds of Union prisoners of war locked in the tobacco warehouses downtown. The bluecoats, rescuers and rescued, formed up and paraded through town. Pouring into the streets around them, dancing and singing, came thousands of African Americans. They had been prisoners for far longer.

In the decades after the jubilee year of 1865, Danville, like many other southern villages, had become a cotton factory town. Anderson, an African-American master’s student from Hampton University, would not have been able to work at the segregated mill. But the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a bureau of the federal government created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, would hire him. To put people back to work after they had lost their jobs in the Great Depression, the WPA organized thousands of projects, hiring construction workers to build schools and artists to paint murals. And many writers and students were hired to interview older Americans—like Lorenzo Ivy, the man painfully shuffling across the pine board floor to answer Anderson’s knock.

Anderson had found Ivy’s name in the Hampton University archives, two hundred miles east of Danville. Back in 1850, when Lorenzo had been born in Danville, there was neither a university nor a city called Hampton—just an American fort named after a slaveholder president. Fortress Monroe stood on Old Point Comfort, a narrow triangle of land that divided the Chesapeake Bay from the James River. Long before the fort was built, in April 1607, the Susan Constant had sailed past the point with a boatload of English settlers. Anchoring a few miles upriver, they had founded Jamestown, the first perma- nent English-speaking settlement in North America. Twelve years later, the crews of two storm-damaged English privateers also passed, seeking shelter and a place to sell the twenty-odd enslaved Africans (captured from a Portuguese slaver) lying shackled in their holds.

After that first 1619 shipload, some 100,000 more enslaved Africans would sail upriver past Old Point Comfort. Lying in chains in the holds of slave ships, they could not see the land until they were brought up on deck to be sold. After the legal Atlantic slave trade to the United States ended in 1807, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people passed the point. Now they were going the other way, boarding ships at Richmond, the biggest eastern center of the internal slave trade, to go by sea to the Mississippi Valley.

By the time a dark night came in late May 1861, the moon had waxed and waned three thousand times over slavery in the South. To protect slavery, Virginia had just seceded from the United States, choosing a side at last after six months of indecision in the wake of South Carolina’s rude exit from the Union. Fortress Monroe, built to protect the James River from ocean-borne invaders, became the Union’s last toehold in eastern Virginia. Rebel troops entrenched themselves athwart the fort’s landward approaches. Local planters, including one Charles Mallory, detailed enslaved men to build berms to shelter the besiegers’ cannon. But late this night, Union sentries on the fort’s seaward side saw a small skiff emerging slowly from the darkness. Frank Baker and Townshend rowed with muffled oars. Sheppard Mallory held the tiller. They were setting themselves free.

A few days later, Charles Mallory showed up at the gates of the Union fort. He demanded that the commanding federal officer, Benjamin Butler, return his property. Butler, a politician from Massachusetts, was an incompetent battlefield commander, but a clever lawyer. He replied that if the men were Mallory’s property, and he was using them to wage war against the US government, then logically the men were therefore contraband of war.

Those first three “contrabands” struck a crack in slavery’s centuries-old wall. Over the next four years, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people widened the crack into a gaping breach by escaping to Union lines. Their movement weakened the Confederate war effort and made it easier for the United States and its president to avow mass emancipation as a tool of war. Eventually the Union Army began to welcome formerly enslaved men into its ranks, turning refugee camps into recruiting stations—and those African-American soldiers would make the difference between victory and defeat for the North, which by late 1863 was exhausted and uncertain.

After the war, Union officer Samuel Armstrong organized literacy programs that had sprung up in the refugee camp at Old Point Comfort to form Hampton Institute. In 1875, Lorenzo Ivy traveled down to study there, on the ground zero of African-American history. At Hampton, he acquired an education that enabled him to return to Danville as a trained schoolteacher. He educated generations of African-American children. He built the house on Holbrook Street with his own Hampton-trained hands, and there he sheltered his father, his brother, his sister-in-law, and his nieces and nephews. In April 1937, Ivy opened the door he’d made with hands and saw and plane, and it swung clear for Claude Anderson without rubbing the frame.1

Anderson’s notepads, however, were accumulating evidence of two very different stories of the American past—halves that did not fit together neatly. And he was about to hear more. Somewhere in the midst of the notepads was a typed list of questions supplied by the WPA. Questions often reveal the desired answer. By the 1930s, most white Americans had been demanding for decades that they hear only a sanitized version of the past into which Lorenzo Ivy had been born. This might seem strange. In the middle of the nineteenth century, white Americans had gone to war with each other over the future of slavery in their country, and slavery had lost. Indeed, for a few years after 1865, many white northerners celebrated emancipation as one of their collective triumphs. Yet whites’ belief in the emancipation made permanent by the Thirteenth Amendment, much less in the race-neutral citizenship that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had written into the Constitution, was never that deep. Many northerners had only supported Benjamin Butler and Abraham Lincoln’s moves against slavery because they hated the arrogance of slaveholders like Charles Mallory. And after 1876, northern allies abandoned southern black voters.

Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-American political and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise African-American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the lynch-mob noose to enforce black compliance. White Americans imposed increased white supremacy outside the South, too. In non-Confederate states, many restaurants wouldn’t serve black customers. Stores and factories refused to hire African Americans. Hundreds of midwestern communities forcibly evicted African-American residents and became “sundown towns” (“Don’t let the sun set on you in this town”). Most whites, meanwhile, believed that science proved that there were biologically distinct human races, and that Europeans were members of the superior one. Anglo-Americans even believed that they were distinct from and superior to the Jews from Russia, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, and others who flooded Ellis Island and changed the culture of northern urban centers.

By the early twentieth century, America’s first generation of professional historians were justifying the exclusions of Jim Crow and disfranchisement by telling a story about the nation’s past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many white Americans, that white supremacy was just and necessary. Above all, the historians of a reunified white nation insisted that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit-seeking. In so doing, historians were to some extent only repeating pre–Civil War debates: abolitionists had depicted slavery not only as a psychopathic realm of whipping, rape, and family separation, but also as a flawed economic system that was inherently less efficient than the free-labor capitalism developing in the North. Proslavery writers disagreed about the psychopathy, but by the 1850s they agreed that enslavers were first and foremost not profit-seekers. For them, planters were caring masters who considered their slaves to be inferior family members. So although anti- and proslavery conclusions about slavery’s morality were different, their premises about slavery-as-a-business-model matched. Both agreed that slavery was inherently unprofitable. It was an old, static system that belonged to an earlier time. Slave labor was inefficient to begin with, slave productivity did not increase to keep pace with industrialization, and enslavers did not act like modern profit-seeking businessmen. As a system, slavery had never adapted or changed to thrive in the new industrial economy—let alone to play a premier role as a driver of economic expansion—and had been little more than a drag on the explosive growth that had built the modern United States. In fact, during the Civil War, northerners were so convinced of these points that they believed that shifting from slave labor to free labor would dramatically increase cotton productivity.

It didn’t. But even though the data of declining productivity over the ensuing three score and ten years suggested that slavery might have been the most efficient way to produce the world’s most important crop, no one let empirical tests change their minds. Instead, historians of Woodrow Wilson’s generation imprinted the stamp of academic research on the idea that slavery was separate from the great economic and social transformations of the Western world during the nineteenth century. After all, it did not rely upon ever-more efficient machine labor. Its unprofitable economic structures supposedly produced antique social arrangements, and the industrializing, urbanizing world looked back toward them with contempt—or, increasingly, nostalgia. Many whites, now proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior, looked wistfully to a past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains. Granted, slavery as an economic system was not modern, they said, and had neither changed to adapt to the modern economy nor contributed to economic expansion. But to an openly racist historical profession—and a white history-reading, history-thinking public obsessed with all kinds of race control—the white South’s desire to white-wash slavery in the past, and maintain segregation now and forever, served the purpose of validating control over supposedly premodern, semi-savage black people.

Such stories about slavery shaped the questions Claude Anderson was to ask in the 1930s, because you could find openly racist versions of it baked into the recipe of every American textbook. You could find it in popular novels, politicians’ speeches, plantation-nostalgia advertising, and even the first blockbuster American film: Birth of a Nation. As president, Woodrow Wilson—a southern-born history professor— called this paean to white supremacy “history written with lightning,” and screened it at the White House. Such ideas became soaked into the way America publicly depicted slavery. Even many of those who believed that they rejected overt racism depicted the era before emancipation as a plantation idyll of happy slaves and paternalist masters. Abolitionists were snakes in the garden, responsible for a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of white people died. Maybe the end of slavery had to come for the South to achieve economic modernity, but it didn’t have to come that way, they said.

The way that Americans remember slavery has changed dramatically since then. In tandem with widespread desegregation of public spaces and the assertion of black cultural power in the years between World War II and the

1990s came a new understanding of the experience of slavery. No longer did academic historians describe slavery as a school in which patient masters and mistresses trained irresponsible savages for futures of perpetual servitude.

Slavery’s denial of rights now prefigured Jim Crow, while enslaved people’s resistance predicted the collective self-assertion that developed into first the civil rights movement and later, Black Power.

But perhaps the changes were not so great as they seemed on the surface. The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters and other spaces outside of white observation. Yet the insistence that assertive resistance undermined enslavers’ power, and a focus on the development of an independent black culture, led some to believe that enslaved people actually managed to prevent whites from successfully exploiting their labor. This idea, in turn, created a quasi-symmetry with post– Civil War plantation memoirs that portrayed gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a nonprofit endeavor aimed at civilizing Africans.

Thus, even after historians of the civil rights, Black Power, and multicultural eras rewrote segregationists’ stories about gentlemen and belles and grateful darkies, historians were still telling the half that has ever been told. For some fundamental assumptions about the history of slavery and the history of the United States remain strangely unchanged. The first major assumption is that, as an economic system—a way of producing and trading commodities—American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it. Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor. This perspective implies not only that slavery didn’t change, but that slavery and enslaved African Americans had little long-term influence on the rise of the United States during the nineteenth century, a period in which the nation went from being a minor European trading partner to becoming the world’s largest economy—one of the central stories of American history.

The second major assumption is that slavery in the United States was fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be resolved in favor of the free-labor North. Sooner or later, slavery would have ended by the operation of historical forces; thus, slavery is a story without suspense. And a story with a predetermined outcome isn’t a story at all.

Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.

All these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape attitudes, identities, and debates about policy. If slavery was outside of US history, for instance—if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket booster to American economic growth—then slavery was not implicated in US growth, success, power, and wealth. Therefore none of the massive quantities of wealth and treasure piled by that economic growth is owed to African Americans. Ideas about slavery’s history determine the ways in which Americans hope to resolve the long contradiction between the claims of the United States to be a nation of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unfreedom, the unequal treatment, and the opportunity denied that for most of American history have been the reality faced by people of African descent. Surely, if the worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of citizen—even elect one of them president—to make amends. Then the issue will be put to rest forever.

Slavery’s story gets told in ways that reinforce all these assumptions. Textbooks segregate twenty-five decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture. Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. All this is the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved people, as two scholars of those weird places put it.2 Meanwhile, at other points we tell slavery’s story by heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or death in rebellion, leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn’t flee or die somehow “accepted” slavery. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians’ collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.

The truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions. But back in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of leading ones, designed by white officials—some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning. He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. “Did slaves mind being called ‘nigger’?” “What did slaves call master or mistress?” “Have you been happier in slavery or free?” “Was the mansion house pretty?” Escaping from chains is very difficult, however, so Anderson dutifully asked the prescribed questions and poised his pencil to take notes.

Ivy listened politely. He sat still. Then he began to speak: “My mother’s master was named William Tunstall. He was a mean man. There was only one good thing he did, and I don’t reckon he intended to do that. He sold our family to my father’s master George H. Gilman.”

Perhaps the wind blowing through the window changed as a cloud moved across the spring sun: “Old Tunstall caught the ‘cotton fever.’ There was a fever going round, leastways it was like a fever. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives. One woman had twelve children. Yessir. Took ‘em all down south with him to Georgia and Alabama.”

Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. Next time it could’ve been his mother. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. No, this wasn’t the story the books told.

So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.

For more than a century, white people in the United States had been singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds. Scapegoaters had a noble precedent. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson tried to blame King George III for using the Atlantic slave trade to impose slavery on the colonies. In historians’ tellings, the 1808 abolition of the Atlantic trade brought stability to slavery, ringing in the “Old South,” as it has been called since before the Civil War. Of course, one might wonder how something that was brand new, created after a revolution, and growing more rapidly than any other commodity-producing economy in history before then could be considered “old.” But never mind. Historians depicted slave trading after 1808 as irrelevant to what slavery was in the “Old South,” and to how America as a whole was shaped. America’s modernization was about entrepreneurs, creativity, invention, markets, movement, and change. Slavery was not about any of these things—not about slave trading, or moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make cotton. Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with each other.

But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words. “They sold slaves here and everywhere. I’ve seen droves of Negroes brought in here on foot going South to be sold. Each one of them had an old tow sack on his back with everything he’s got in it. Over the hills they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in double lines chained together by twos. They walk ‘em here to the railroad and shipped ’em south like cattle.”

Then Lorenzo Ivy said this: “Truly, son, the half has never been told.”

To this, day, it still has not. For the other half is the story of how slavery changed and moved and grew over time: Lorenzo Ivy’s time, and that of his parents and grandparents. In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized—also by force—from their Native American inhabitants. From

1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth. And that truth was the half of the story that survived mostly in the custodianship of those who survived slavery’s expansion—whether they had been taken over the hill, or left behind. Forced migration had shaped their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. But what survivors experienced, analyzed, and named was a slavery that didn’t fit the comfortable boxes into which other Americans have been trying to fit it ever since it ended.

I read Lorenzo Ivy’s words, and they left me uneasy. I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history—not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre–Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents. Most of all, the half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex-slaves, such as Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.

For a long time I wasn’t sure how to tell the story of this muscular, dynamic process in a single book. The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre–Civil War United States. Enslavers’ surviving papers showed calculations of returns from slave sales and purchases as well as the costs of establishing new slave labor camps in the cotton states. Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The accounts of northern merchants and bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery’s expansion. Scholars and students talked about politics as a battle about states’ rights or republican principles, but viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery’s expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue.

The story seemed too big to fit into one framework. Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the vast open spaces beyond. From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in 1790 to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa. And could one book do Lorenzo Ivy’s insight justice? It would have to avoid the old platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a collection of topics—here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating heart out of the story. For the half untold was a narrative, a process of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what had been done before them—and what people chose to do in response.

No, this had to be a story, and one couldn’t tell it solely from the perspective of powerful actors. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even remade the land itself. But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy’s words as a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains. Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent themselves every day. Enslaved people’s creativity enabled their survival, but, stolen from them in the form of ever-growing cotton productivity, their creativity also expanded the slaveholding South at an unprecedented rate. Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.

One day I found a metaphor that helped. It came from the great African-American author Ralph Ellison. You might know his novel Invisible Man. But in the 1950s, Ellison also produced incredible essays. In one of them he wrote, “On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.”3

The image fit the story that Ivy’s words raised above the watery surface of buried years. The only problem was that Ellison’s image implied a stationary giant. In the old myth, the stationary, quintessentially unchanging plantation was the site and the story of African-American life from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. But Lorenzo Ivy had described a world in motion. After the American Revolution—which seemed at the time to portend slavery’s imminent demise—a metastatic transformation and growth of slavery’s giant body had begun instead. From the exploitation, commodification, and torture of enslaved people’s bodies, enslavers and other free people gained new kinds of modern power. The sweat and blood of the growing system, a network of individuals and families and labor camps that grew bigger with each passing year, fueled massive economic change. Enslaved people, meanwhile, transported and tortured, had to find ways to survive, resist, or endure. And over time the question of their freedom or bondage came to occupy the center of US politics.

This trussed-up giant, stretched out on the rack of America’s torture zone, actually grew, like a person passing through ordeals to new maturity. I have divided the chapters of this book with Ellison’s imagined giant in mind, a structure that has allowed the story to take as its center point the experience of enslaved African Americans themselves. Before we pass through the door that Lorenzo Ivy opened, here are the chapters’ names. The first is “Feet,” for the story begins with unfree movement on paths to enslaved frontiers that were laid down between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the early 1800s. “Heads” is the title of the second chapter, which covers America’s acquisition of the key points of the Mississippi Valley by violence, a gain that also consolidated the enslavers’ hold on the frontier. Then come the “Right Hand” and the “Left Hand” (Chapters 3 and 4). They reveal the inner secrets of enslavers’ power, secrets which made the entire world of white people wealthy.

“Tongues” (Chapter 5) and “Breath” (Chapter 6) follow. They describe how, by the mid-1820s, enslavers had not only found ways to silence the tongues of their critics, but had built a system of slave trading that served as expansion’s lungs. Most forms of resistance were impossible to carry out successfully. So a question hung in the air. Would the spirit in the tied-down body die, leaving enslaved people to live on like undead zombies serving their captors? Or would the body live, and rise? Every transported soul, finding his or her old life killed off, faced this question on the individual level as well: whether to work with fellow captives or scrabble against them in a quest for individualistic subsistence. Enslaved African Americans chose many things. But perhaps most importantly, they chose survival, and true survival in such circumstances required solidarity. Solidarity allowed them to see their common experience, to light their own way by building a critique of enslavers’ power that was an alternative story about what things were and what they meant.

This story draws on thousands of personal narratives like the one that Lorenzo Ivy told Claude Anderson. Slavery has existed in many societies, but no other population of formerly enslaved people has been able to record the testimonies of its members like those who survived slavery in the United States. The narratives began with those who escaped slavery’s expansion in the nineteenth century as fugitives. Over one hundred of those survivors published their autobiographies during the nineteenth century. As time went on, such memoirs found a market, in no small part because escapees from southern captivity were changing the minds of some of the northern whites about what the expansion of slavery meant for them. Then, during the 1930s, people like Claude Anderson conducted about 2,300 interviews with the ex-slaves who had lived into that decade. Because the interviews often allowed old people to tell about the things they had seen for themselves and the things they heard from their elders in the years before the Civil War, they take us back into the world of explanation and storytelling that grew up around fires and on porches and between cotton rows. No one autobiography or interview is pure and objective as an account of all that the history books left untold. But read them all, and each one adds to a more detailed, clearer picture of the whole. One story fills in gaps left by another, allowing one to read between the lines.4

Understanding something of what it felt like to suffer, and what it cost to endure that suffering, is crucial to understanding the course of US history. For what enslaved people made together—new ties to each other, new ways of understanding their world—had the potential to help them survive in mind and body. And ultimately, their spirit and their speaking would enable them to call new allies into being in the form of an abolitionist movement that helped to destabilize the mighty enslavers who held millions captive. But the road on which enslaved people were being driven was long. It led through the hell described by “Seed” (Chapter 7), which tells of the horrific near-decade from 1829 to 1837. In these years entrepreneurs ran wild on slavery’s frontier. Their acts created the political and economic dynamics that carried enslavers to their greatest height of power. Facing challenges from other white men who wanted to assert their masculine equality through political democracy, clever entrepreneurs found ways to leverage not just that desire, but other desires as well. With the creation of innovative financial tools, more and more of the Western world was able to invest directly in slavery’s expansion. Such creativity multiplied the incredible productivity and profitability of enslaved people’s labor and allowed enslavers to turn bodies into commodities with which they changed the financial history of the Western world.

Enslavers, along with common white voters, investors, and the enslaved, made the 1830s the hinge of US history. On one side lay the world of the industrial revolution and the initial innovations that launched the modern world. On the other lay modern America. For in 1837, enslavers’ exuberant success led to a massive economic crash. This self-inflicted devastation, covered in Chapter 8, “Blood,” posed new challenges to slaveholders’ power, led to human destruction for the enslaved, and created confusion and discord in white families. When southern political actors tried to use war with Mexico to restart their expansion, they encountered new opposition on the part of increasingly assertive northerners. As Chapter 9, “Backs,” explains, by the 1840s the North had built a complex, industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor. Yet, although all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people, many northern whites were now willing to use politics to oppose further expansions of slavery. The words that the survivors of slavery’s expansion had carried out from the belly of the nation’s hungriest beast had, in fact, become important tools for galvanizing that opposition.

Of course, in return for the benefits they received from slavery’s expansion, plenty of northerners were still willing to enable enslavers’ disproportionate power. With the help of such allies, as “Arms” (Chapter 10) details, slavery continued to expand in the decade after the Compromise of 1850. For now, however, it had to do so within potentially closed borders. That is why southern whites now launched an aggressive campaign of advocacy, insisting on policies and constitutional interpretations that would commit the entire United States to the further geographic expansion of slavery. The entire country would become slavery’s next frontier. And as they pressed, they generated greater resistance, pushed too hard, and tried to make their allies submit—like slaves, the allies complained. And that is how, at last, whites came to take up arms against each other.

Yet even as southern whites seceded, claiming that they would set up an independent nation, shelling Fort Sumter, and provoking the Union’s president, Abraham Lincoln, to call out 100,000 militia, many white Americans wanted to keep the stakes of this dispute as limited as possible. A majority of northern Unionists opposed emancipation. Perhaps white Americans’ battles with each other were, on one level, not driven by a contest over ideals, but over the best way to keep the stream of cotton and financial revenues flowing: keep slavery within its current borders, or allow it to consume still more geographic frontiers. But the growing roar of cannon promised others a chance to force a more dramatic decision: slavery forever, or nevermore. So it was that as Frank Baker, Townshend, and Sheppard Mallory crept across the dark James River waters that had washed so many hulls bearing human bodies, the future stood poised, uncertain between alternative paths. Yet those three men carried something powerful: the same half of the story that Lorenzo Ivy could tell. All they had learned from it would help to push the future onto a path that led to freedom. Their story can do so for us as well. To hear it, we must stand as Lorenzo Ivy had stood as a boy in Danville—watching the chained lines going over the hills, or as Frank Baker and others had stood, watching the ships going down the James from the Richmond docks, bound for the Mississippi. Then turn and go with the marching feet, and listen for the breath of the half that has never been told.

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