Local Topics

What the South most needs is “peace,” and peace depends upon the supremacy of the law. There can be no enduring peace if the constitutional rights of any portion of the people are habitually disregarded.... All parts of the Constitution are sacred and must be sacredly observed—the parts that are new no less than the parts that are old. The moral and national prosperity of the Southern States can be most effectively advanced by a hearty and generous recognition of the rights of all, by all—a recognition without reserve or exception. With such a recognition fully accorded it will be practicable to promote, by the influence of all the legitimate agencies of the General Government, the efforts of the people of those States to obtain for themselves the blessings of honest and capable local government.
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)

Failing to divide its social chromosomes and split up into new cells, each bearing some portion of the original inheritance, the city continues to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Here the city has absorbed villages and little towns, reducing them to place names, like Manhattanville and Harlem in New York; there it has, more happily, left the organs of local government and the vestiges of an independent life, even assisted their revival, as in Chelsea and Kensington in London; but it has nevertheless enveloped those areas in its physical organization and built up the open land that once served to ensure their identity and integrity.
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)

America has a history of political isolation and economic self-sufficiency; its citizens have tended to regard the rest of the world as a disaster area from which lucky or pushy people emigrate to the Promised Land. Alternatively, they think of other nations as mere showplaces for picturesque scenery, odd flora and fauna and quaint artifacts. The American tourist abroad therefore wears clothes suitable for a trip to a disaster area, or for a visit to a museum or zoo: comfortable, casual, brightly colored, relatively cheap: not calculated to arouse envy or pick up dirt. Britain, on the other hand, remains in imagination a world empire. Its citizens go abroad as representatives of the Top Nation, concerned to uphold its reputation and present a good example to lesser races. Britons therefore dress up rather than down for travel, whatever the local conditions.
—Alison Lurie (b. 1926)