It’s hot out! How about some sweet tea?

There are few things more southern than a tall glass of sweet iced tea.

Mother's Iced Tea for Tar Heels Only - Tarheels Cooking for Ronald's Kids

Mother’s Iced Tea For Tar Heels Only! from Tarheels cooking for Ronald’s kids.

Ready to Drink Iced Tea - A Taste of the Old and the New

Ready to Drink Iced Tea from A Taste of the old and the new.

Sassafras Tea - Red's Cook Book

Sassafras Tea from Red’s cook book : (road kill not included).

Sweet Iced Tea - The Charlotte Cookbook

Sweet Iced Tea from The Charlotte cookbook.

Tea Punch (Serves 70) - Favorite Recipes of the Lower Cape Fear

Tea Punch from Favorite recipes of the Lower Cape Fear.

Long Island Iced Tea - Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide

Long Island Iced Tea from Hemingway & Bailey’s bartending guide to great American writers.

View from train, 1861: Pull the curtains — please!

“For ‘the first time in the States,’ wrote English correspondent William Howard Russell as his train crossed into North Carolina in 1861, ‘I noticed barefooted people’ and ‘poor broken-down shanties or loghuts’ filled with ‘paleface… tawdry and ragged’ women and ‘yellow, seedy-looking’ men.”

— From “Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction” by Allen C. Guelzo (2012)

Nor does the view seem to have improved much by 1865. 

At least Frederick Law Olmsted, in his 1856 classic “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States,”  had blamed the “ignorance and torpidity” of North Carolinians on poor soil and inadequate roads and schools, rather than on “any innate quality of the popular mind.”