The 2010 Federal Census data documents a faster rate of growth in cities compared to their respective suburbs, for the first time in nine decades. The cities with the sharpest growth rate change are Washington, D.C., Denver, and Atlanta. Every region of the United States sees this shift in the 2010 data, New York, Milwaukee, [...]
The 2012 Olympic Games begin this week in London. My adopted hometown of Atlanta hosted the Olympics in 1996, two years before my family even lived here. For as far away as those Centennial Olympic Games were from me at the time, living in Kingsford, Michigan, they may as well have been in any [...]
More interesting thought on the differences in culture and outlook caused by language… just because since reading about languages recently, I’ve picked up again a book I got about halfway through a few years ago. Dreaming in Hindi is a book on language, and India, and friendships and drama, and culture, and battles with cancer, and seeing and [...]
This week I was assigned a reference request for a naturalization that took place in Miami in the 1980s. This is a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill request, where a person writes or calls the National Archives at Atlanta to request the Petition for Naturalization of a person, for whatever reason they need it. I’ve had people [...]
“Decor tends to out-of-date calendars, mismatched crockery, paintings of bears in the forest, and lace curtains hanging in doorways to defend against mosquitoes.” I read this description several times, in a perfectly-timed National Geographic article about the Russian dacha, which is a fully Russian cultural element, and is basically the little plot of land where [...]
Two things I love to talk about have collided: National Geographic has published in their July 2012 issue a stunning 33-page spread on the crisis small languages face in a world run by business, the Internet, and a demand for global citizens to all be able to communicate across political and cultural boundaries. On my [...]
It is an oft-approached topic in college history classes: American exceptionalism. Especially when you get to the graduate level, you only discuss it more. Americans, throughout history, have touted themselves, their brand of government and social structure, their notions of upward mobility, and their presence in other nations as products of the fated “city on a [...]