For every gang war that ever was in Medellín, a thousand others have been averted through negotiation and trade

For every gang war that ever was in Medellín, a thousand others have been averted through negotiation and trade. Even though the valley is filled to its green peaks with hotheaded armed gang members, the combos of Medellín seldom go to war. They despise one another. They maneuver for drug plazas and prison hallways. They occasionally skirmish. But the region’s homicide rate is lower than that of many big American cities

C. Blattman, Why we fight (2022), loc. 670

If cotton was the king of the antebellum South, rice was her queen

If cotton was the king of the antebellum South, rice was her queen for the three centuries of her engagement with slavery. With the revamp of Carolina Golden rice and other heirloom varieties and hybrids thereof, the narrative of rice in the South has been centred in the rebirth of one of its most important cash crops as a boutique ingredient.

M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 241

It was a labor camp system for exiled prisoners of war and victims of kidnapping

The American plantation wasn't the quaint village community that you saw depicted in your history textbook. It was a labor camp system for exiled prisoners of war and victims of kidnapping.

M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 5

He follows this up with a hammer of a metaphor about his grandmother who left Alabama at the earliest opportunity she could: 'Once she left Alabama, she never went back to Alabama. The heart of Dixie was her Poland' (Ibid. 56) 

The addition of a family of four to the typical urban area necessitates an additional ten thousand square feet of parking space

Since each major urban center served but a single function, parking lots began to multiple rapidly. Culture center parking serves only its patrons and is not used most of the time. Mall lots are all but vacant after nine in the evening. Arena lots, school lots, medical center lots, etc., enjoy no shared use but must be there. We have arrived at that point where the addition of a family of four to the typical urban area necessitates an additional ten thousand square feet of parking space to accommodate members’ vehicles at home and in the variety of separated centers at which they will have to park them. And now, we must use up a lot of land to secure houses and lots away from the congestion of auto traffic. Nothing was harder hit by unifunctional planning

R. Oldenburg, The great good place (1987), 216

Community social life is necessary to healthy religious life

It wasn’t that the American farmer lacked the social instinct or had any less of it than anyone else. It was that the conditions of rural life and, often, that of local clergymen, operated against its realization in the social habits of the people. In Clermont, Ohio, for example, a survey conducted in 1914 showed the clergy’s stand on the following social activities: Sunday baseball (100 percent against), movies (65 percent against), dancing (90 percent against), playing cards (97 percent against), pool halls (85 percent against), and the annual circuses (48 percent against). Only tennis, croquet, and agricultural fairs received general approval.

....

The authors of that report concluded with some irony that the churches were strongest where the lodges were strongest and that “both are expressions of the same spirit of fraternity and sociability.” Two clear conclusions were drawn: “(1) Community social life is necessary to healthy religious life, and (2) If the church is going to succeed it must recognize the social needs of the community and assume its share of the leadership in social activities.” Perhaps the strongest indictment that can be made against the Puritanism and Protestantism of developing America is that, far too often, they sought to ensure the life of the church at the expense of the life of the community.

R. Oldenburg, The great good place (1987), 73

The more people moved about, or were moved about by the companies that employed them, the more difficult it became to penetrate the nation’s residential areas

Once America became the high mobility society it now is, with about twenty percent of the population changing residence every year, one might have thought that neighborhoods would have been designed so that people could be integrated quickly and easily. What actually happened, however, was quite the opposite. The more people moved about, or were moved about by the companies that employed them, the more difficult it became to penetrate the nation’s residential areas.

R. Oldenburg, The great good place (1987), loc. 258

The horror that was lynching was called life by Black America

White woman in Mississippi claimed that a fourteen-year-old Black boy had said something suggestive to her, and then her husband and brother beat the boy, wrapped barbed wire around his neck, shot him in the head, and threw him over the bridge into the Little Tallahatchie. The image of the boy in his open casket awakened the nation to the horror of lynching. At least the White nation. The horror that was lynching was called life by Black America. The killers, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-White jury.

P. Everett, The Trees (2022), loc 954

Senatorial power had been a coefficient of Presidential weakness

Senatorial power had been a coefficient of Presidential weakness, and for thirty years, Presidents had either like Grant, or indecisive, or simply cowed by the mighty Senate. But with the crack of the assassin’s gunshot that struck down McKinley, and, to the rage of Senator Mark Hanna, put “that dammed cowboy” Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, the era of weak Presidents was over.

R. Caro, The years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3: master of the senate (2002), 37

The people should have as little to do as may be about the government

Each state, the Framers decided, would be represented by only two senators; the first Senate of the United state consisted of just twenty-six men. Another was the most by which senators would be elected. When one of the Framers, James Wilson of Pennsylvanie, suggested that they be elected by the people, not a single member of the Convention rose to support him. “The people should have as little to do as may be about the government,” Roger Sherman declared. “They lack information and are constantly liable to be misled.” 

R. Caro, The years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3: master of the senate (2002), 9

Few, if any Americans could match the breadth of his intellect and the strength of his character

Yet there was no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt was peculiarly qualified to be President of all the people. Few, if any Americans could match the breadth of his intellect and the strength of his character. A random survey of his achievements might show him mastering German, French and the contrasted dialects of Harvard and Dakota Territory; assembling fossil skeletons with paleontological skill; fighting for an amateur boxing championship; transcribing birdsong into a private system of phonetics; chasing boat thieves with a star on his breast and Tolstoy in his pocket; founding a finance club, a stockman’s association, and hunting-conservation society; reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own; climbing the Matterhorn; promulgating a flying machine; and becoming a world authority on North American game mammals. Any Roosevelt watcher could make up a different but equally varied list.

E. Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), 11

In the early 1950s the African-American sections of America’s inner cities were largely viable, stable communities

Despite the crowded conditions, in the early 1950s the African-American sections of America’s inner cities were largely viable, stable communities; however, the subsequent three decades were quite destabilizing. Federal urban renewal and highway programs required land in inner cities, and African-American neighborhoods were often razed. Low-income African Americans were then relocated into publicly funded housing projects, while middle- and upper-class African Americans were forced to relocate elsewhere. Using a set of policies that both explicitly and implicitly discriminated against African Americans, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) then began to offer subsidized mortgages that enabled millions of Caucasians to purchase homes in the suburbs and flee the cities. Ironically, advances in the civil rights movement later reduced suburban housing discrimination, allowing middle- and upper-class African Americans to relocate to the suburbs as well. As a result of this suburban flight, the remaining inner-city, African-American communities lost leaders, role models, working families, and a solid economic base.

S. Corbett & B. Fikkert, When helping hurts: How to alleviate poverty without hurting the Poor (2014), 85