For those of you who are new enough to SFTF that this is your first football season and you didn't need a GPA booster at Northwestern that counted as a math/science class without burdening you with any math or science (thanks Medill), I introduce you to John Crandall Hudson. Our boy John C. is all the about the geography of North America, baby. And we like to use what he has written in Across this Land: A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada to learn just enough about our opponent's home state/town to make fun of it.
See what Hudson has to say about Nashville, the stomping grounds of the hated(?) Vanderbilt Commodores.
It's all after the jump, my friends.
In 1779 a company of settlers from North Carolina founded the settlement that became Nashville on the banks of the Cumberland River...North Carolinians named their first settlement Fort Nashborough. The name was changed to Nashville in 1784, a reflection of the anti-British and pro-French sentiments of the Revolutionary War period. Cattle and hogs raised in the Nashville Basin made it one of the most important meat-producing areas in the nation by 1850. Cotton and tobacco grown on Nashville Basin plantations employed more than ninety thousand slaves in 1860...It's greatest fame, however, began with a country music radio program, the Grand Old Opry, which has been broadcast live every Saturday night from Nashville since October 1925.
A close reading of the text shows that Nashville has added to the fabric of American society in the following way: It has allowed for us to get fat on meat while wearing comfortable cotton clothing, smoking cigarettes, and listening to country music. Now if that doesn't say America, then I don't know what does. Thanks, Nashville.
The only thing that's missing from that vignette is a handgun and some liquor. Oh, they make that in Tennessee, too, here and here. Well then - crisis averted.
And for those of you who like omens, there's one last nugget that we can take from Hudson's Nashville section:
French hunters and traders from Illinois had been coming to the Nashville Basin for some time before 1770 to slaughter the Bison that roamed freely through the Nashville Basin's grassy openings.
Hmmm. People coming from Illinois to slaughter other beings in Nashville. Sounds like a prediction I can get behind.
Filed under: General
Tags: geography lessons, John C. Hudson, Nashville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt
