The Biltmore I spent today in Asheville , North Carolina, visiting the Biltmore. It’s a Gilded Age masterpiece that happens to be the largest house ever built in the US. Visiting here creates a painful dilemma. Biltmore is an entirely private attraction, so it charges very high admission fees to pay the cost of keeping the place running. The fees are so high that the only way to justify a visit is to spend the entire day seeing everything it has to offer. Thanks to the schedule I had to keep, this meant I had to choose between seeing Biltmore and seeing anything else in Ashville. I ultimately chose Biltmore, because a sight this impressive is just too important to pass up. It put every other house tour... read more

Today was another day exploring Atlanta. I started at one of the city’s most famous landmarks. The battle to preserve it actually started the city’s preservation movement in 1975 (compare this to Savannah, where preservation started decades earlier). That landmark is the Fox Theater. Fox Theater The story of the theater starts with the local Shriners’ chapter, Yaarab. By the mid 1920s, they had outgrown their original headquarters, and wanted to build a new one. They acquired land in Atlanta’s Midtown section, which at the time was a streetcar suburb, and had a competition to design the building. The chapter chose an Egyptian and Moorish fantasy by local architects P. Thorton Mary... read more

Today was my first day in Atlanta Georgia. Atlanta is famous in the popular imagination as the city that General Sherman burned to the ground near the end of the Civil War. Local businessmen would rather that people view Atlanta as the city that quickly came back from that experience, and is now the premier city in the entire South. Arch-rival Charlotte (see ) will have something to say about that, of course, but Atlanta does have a reasonable claim. Atlanta History Center The place to explore Atlanta’s history is the Atlanta History Center. It’s located in Buckhead, the city’s wealthiest neighborhood. Significantly, Buckhead is the furthest neighborhood north of downtown. Getting here requires driving past an endless parade of mansions, not all of them the url=http://www.urbandictionary.co... read more

Today I visit one of the most important historic sites on the entire trip. It tells the history of iron smelting in the US. Iron smelting, as noted earlier, is the reason Birmingham exists. Before that, however, I wanted some culture. I found it at the Birmingham Art Museum. Birmingham Art Museum The museum is a relatively small encyclopedic museum. I enjoyed it more than the Speed Art museum in Louisville (see ) even though they are close to the same size. Part of the reason was that they have more art that I like, and it was arranged better. Contemporary work in this museum gets an entire section, while at the Speed it was limited to one corridor. The other reason was the through explanati... read more

Most of today was another day behind the wheel. I needed some time out of the car, and found it in Nashville. I went to the Hermitage. This is the cotton plantation founded by one of American history’s more crucial, and controversial, figures: Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson was the third of three sons of Irish immigrants. His father died during the crossing, so his mother was a widow when he was born in rural South Carolina (a few people claim he was born on ship, and forged his birth papers later). Life on what was then the frontier was very rough. All three boys ultimately joined the army during the Revolution. South Carolina commanders used boys like them to run messages to the troops and other armies. The job was crucial and also very ... read more