A NEW TREND EMERGED in the 1990s: a shift of city dwellers from metropolitan areas to small towns and cities. This trend is particularly evident in the South as this region attracts more growth and more second homes and experiences increases in income and education levels. Frustrated with city traffic, air pollution, crowded suburbs, and declining quality of life, city dwellers are seeking desirable, small Southern towns. Finding the best town, however, can be a challenge. This helpful guide is just the place to start your search. Sweitzer and Fields researched and visited over 150 sites to give you this comprehensive guidebook with information on the fifty best small towns in nine southeastern states. To be featured in the book, each town had to meet stringent qualifications: population under 25,000, positive population growth, readily available cultural and recreational attractions, adult education opportunities, healthcare options, and internet access. Each town's detailed description includes information on: Recreational highlights Cultural scene Natural environment Economic and education profiles Healthcare Vital statistics (population, cost of living, median incomes, etc.) Directions. The appendix offers quick reference charts showing the carious facts and features for each town.

This comprehensive guidebook offers information on the fifty best small southern towns in nine southeastern states. To be featured in the book, each town had to meet stringent qualifications: population under 25,000, positive population growth, readily available cultural and recreation attractions, adult education opportunities, healthcare options, and Internet access.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.

We tend to associate small town economic development with the decline of the rural United States--empty houses, shuttered shops and rusting factories. A common diagnosis of sluggish small town recovery is their lack of lifestyle amenities that attract new residents and businesses. Yet many small towns have shown progress and potential in recent years. This collection of recent articles by experts presents stories of small-town America's struggle and describes innovations and practices behind successful revivals.

Francisco grew up at McCarroll Place, his familyb2ss ancestral home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, thirty miles north of Oxford. In the conversations with Wolff, he recalls that as a boy he would sit and listen as his father and Faulkner sat on the gallery and talked about whatever came to mind. Francisco frequently told stories to Faulkner, many of them oft-repeated, about his family and community, which dated to antebellum times. Some of these stories, Wolff shows, found their way into Faulknerb2ss fiction. Faulkner also displayed an absorbing interest in a seven-volume diary kept by Dr. Franciscob2ss great-great-grandfather Francis Terry Leak, who owned extensive plantation lands in northern Mississippi before the Civil War. Some parts of the diary recount incidents in Leakb2ss life, but most of the diary concerns business transactions, including the buying and selling of slaves and the building of a plantation home.

Newly updated comparative study of economic development policy, and its relationship with local power structures and cultural and social relations, in two Maryland towns. Community economic development is conventionally explained using one of two models: a market model that assumes individuals always attempt to maximize their wealth, or a growth model that assumes land use is controlled by real estate developers who invariably pursue outside investment as a way of increasing land values and creating jobs and opportunities. In the first edition of Community, Culture, and Economic Development, Meredith Ramsay’s close study of two small towns on Maryland’s Lower Shore demonstrated that neither model can explain why these communities, alike in so many ways, responded so differently to economic decline or why archaic hierarchies of race, class, and gender remain deeply embedded and poverty seems nearly intractable. Ramsay showed how the lack of economic progress in Somerset, Maryland’s poorest county, can best be explained by factoring history, culture, and social relations into the investigator’s research. In this second edition she discusses changes that have taken place in the county since the early 1990s, including the dramatic legal victory of the “Somerset Six” and the Maryland ACLU, which ultimately paved the way for the election of an African American to a top county position for the first time in history. Praise for the First Edition “This is a fascinating and sophisticated account of rural politics that is much more than anecdotal. The book is unique in applying theories developed in the study of urban policy (market, growth machine, regime) to the politics of rural places. The analysis rings true; it is both theoretically interesting and factually revealing. It may be the best account of small-town politics since the classic Small Town in Mass Society.” — Alvin D. Sokolow, University of California Davis “On rare occasions a book has such depth of insight and freshness of presentation that it breaks down conventional distinctions among facts, values, and theory. Meredith Ramsay’s account of two rural communities is such a study. It incorporates all three in a seamless account. This is a book about everyday people engaged in real struggles, and it never loses sight of the context in which they operate. Ramsay makes social and historical embeddedness come alive and inform in a way that few authors can.” — Clarence Stone, University of Maryland

Featuring 53 towns new to this edition, this book lists the most art-friendly small communities throughout the United States and in several Canadian provinces.