Day: August 23, 2018

So you think you know North Carolina…. No. 34

1. The symbol of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg displays back-to-back A’s — why?

2. In an alphabetical listing of the states, North Carolina precedes North Dakota. What state does it follow?

3. What famous golfer won his first professional tournament at Pinehurst in 1940? Which one won his last at Pinehurst in 1999?

4. True or false: More than 20 times as many North Carolinians died in the Civil War as in the Vietnam War.

5. A former U.S. senator from North Carolina and a writer known as the “poet laureate of Appalachia” share what name?

Answers below

 

 

 

 

 

1. It tagged itself the “All American” unit — the first to draw members from all 48 states. Formed in 1917 at Camp Gordon, Ga., the 82nd has been based at Fort Bragg since 1946.

2. New York.

3. Ben Hogan won the North and South Open, Payne Stewart the U.S. Open. Barely four months later Stewart died in a private plane crash near Aberdeen, S.D.

4. True. The Civil War claimed at least 33,000 soldiers from North Carolina; the Vietnam War, 1,609.

5. Robert Morgan. One served as state attorney general and as U.S. senator, the other is author of the best-selling “Gap Creek.”

 

1784 statute showed disdain for inherited wealth

“With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property….
“The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule.
“North Carolina’s 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old system had served ‘only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic’ and promoting ‘contention and injustice.’ Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast ‘tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic.’ “

— From “Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and other fellow travelers” by Stephen Budiansky at Sophrosyne (Oct. 14, 2010)