The commencement of warm weather gives activity to

decomposition, and the soft air is redolent of its products: and

in sundry different spots of every town, the effluvia arising

from filthily kept yards, of stables and hog styes, of privies, and

sometimes the breezes tainted by a dead cat...areoffered to our

sense of smelling.—Edmund Ruffin, 

I believe...wecanmake St. Augustine the Newport of the South.

—Henry Flagler, 

A city cannot be a work of art.—Jane Jacobs, 

The capital of Mississippi, Jackson, is deserted on Friday

afternoon. No one walks its streets....Thecenters of many of the

most interesting Southern cities, the neighborhoods that make

them most distinct and attractive, have been forsaken for fast-food

places, gas stations, and shopping centers at the outskirts, which

resemble any other place in the United States.

—Charles Simic, 

6

  

t

Throughout the temperate and tropical zones of the globe,

agriculture made possible the highest expressions of civili-

zation—that is, towns and cities. As the Mesoamerican

Neolithic revolution diffused northeastward, first through

what we call the South, thousands of towns and not a few

large settlements we might term cities appeared. Cahokia,

east of present-day St. Louis (and arguably southern), was

the largest, but other populous, year-round, and well-forti-

fied towns thrived across the South all through the Missis-

sippian era and into the long period of European invasions.

European and then African pioneers met native southern-

ers who were civilized in the essential sense that they were

to a considerable extent urbanized.

The great native towns are no more. Cahokia, Etowa,

and other surviving mound sites are archaeological digs