Partly due to the introduction of air conditioning and the trend for retirees to settle there, it has experience dramatic population growth in the post-World-War-II period.

The term can be spelled “sunbelt,” “Sunbelt,” and “Sun Belt.” However, the most common spelling is “Sun Belt,” which is used by such major American publications as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Furthermore, it is the spelling used by the Sun Belt Conference, a college athletic conference of twelve higher education institutions in the region.

“sunbelt”

• “But Boston’s heady period of growth was over by 1920. Between 1920 and 1950, the city population stayed flat, while the country’s population grew by 50 percent. Between 1950 and 1980, the city lost population. In 1910, Boston was the fifth largest city in the country. By 1980, 19 cities were bigger than Boston. Boston declined for at least four separate reasons. First, Boston was a cold city and over the 20th century, warm cities grew much more quickly than cold cities. Air conditioning and improvements in public health greatly increased the quality of public life in the sunbelt. Declining transport costs freed workers from having to live close to rivers or natural resources. Instead, people could move to warm places that were pleasant to live in.”—Edward L. Glaser, Reinventing Boston: 1640-2003, (2003), p. 5.

“Sunbelt”

• “The population count released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau showed the total U.S. population was 308,745,538 and confirmed long-held assumptions that the balance of power in the country is titling away from Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and Midwest to warmer states in the Sunbelt, from Florida to Arizona, where Republicans hold sway.”—Patrick O’Connor, “GOP-Leaning States Gain in Census,” The Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2010.
• “In real estate, of course, location matters. High-traffic areas are obviously better than low-traffic areas; neighborhoods with plenty of senior citizens are prized too—the average 70-year-old takes 16 prescription medicines a year, double the number taken by a 50-year-old. (That last fact explains why the bulk of Walgreens’ grand openings of late have been in the Sunbelt: multitudes of retirees.) Judging by the longevity of its stores, Walgreens picks its spots well: Of the 3,600 new stores it has opened over the past ten years, it has closed only two because of poor sales. ‘We don’t make too many mistakes in real estate,’ says [David] Bernauer [Walgreen’s CEO], in what for him is a wild display of braggadocio.”—Matthew Boyle, “Drug Wars: Walgreens has racked up an amazing track record over the past 30 years. Now, as it confronts some scary new rivals, the drug chain is going to find out if it’s really built to last,” Fortune, June 1, 2005.

“Sun Belt”

• “‘The older industrial cities are going to suffer’ from shrinking employment and forbidding weather, says Mr. Rosen of the University of California. Some Sun Belt cities, including Atlanta, also could languish if traffic jams and sprawl ruin their charms, he says.”—James R. Haggerty, “The Future for Home Prices: Americans still see real estate as their best shot at wealth. It may be wishful thinking,” The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2008.
• “Bettman, long distrusted in Canada for what was seen as encouraging the failed strategy of seeding hockey in the Sun Belt and for his roots as an N.B.A. deputy commissioner, has been vilified by many Canadians for opposing Balsillie.”—Jeff Z. Klein and Ken Belson, “N.H.L. Wades Further Into Coyotes Case and Maybe a Quagmire,” The New York Times, August 28, 2008.
• “Camden Property, which started out in Texas and has focused on the Sun Belt states, has been expanding nationally as well. ‘The Sun Belt tends to be volatile, and our sense is Camden knows how to operate in those markets,’ Mr. Smotrich added.”—Vivian Marino, “It’s a Good Time to Be a Landlord,” The New York Times, July 17, 2006.
• “When young Cheryl [Mendelson] was 13, her parents, having failed at farming, moved to the Sun Belt. ‘My whole identity was erased,’ she said. ‘Here I’d grown up doing laundry in the backyard, hanging it on the line with my grandmother. Then I get to suburban America and all this was regarded with complete contempt. Other mothers were saying things like, “I don’t want you to know about these things—you’re going to be something.” So I said, “All right, this is the game I’m going to play,” and I left it all behind until I made my way to New York City in 1981 to practice law.’”—Rick Marin, “A Scholar Tackles the Wash,” The New York Times, September 29, 2005.
• “The Post examines the National Hockey League‘s financial train wreck. Starting 13 years ago the league, then 21 teams, expanded geographically—with nine new franchises, many in the Sun Belt—in order to win a lucrative national TV contract. The resulting broadcast deal pays only $4 million per team annually (compared to the NFL‘s $80 million per), and ratings are poor. Meanwhile, the expansion diluted talent, reduced goals-per-game, and left a larger percentage of the league out of the lucrative playoff season. Profits declined—two thirds of teams are losing money—while player salaries skyrocketed.”—Michael Brus, “Semi-Private Jets,” Slate, January 17, 2004.
• “Nowadays, too, more Americans live in warmer climates. The area roughly below the 37th parallel—from North Carolina to Southern California—was home to 40% of Americans in 2000, up from just 28% in 1950. The Sun Belt‘s informality and warmer temperatures, which make tank tops and flip-flops that much more inviting, have probably nudged all of us toward a more fashion-free America.”—Daniel Askt, “Casualities,” The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2003.
• “As the contracts expired, the Times Herald launched an ambitious campaign to overtake the Morning News and become the preeminent newspaper of Dallas—a prize of considerable value, since the Dallas market was expanding daily in the Texas boom that had been touched off by the Arab oil embargo and fed by Sun Belt migration.”—Calvin Trillin, American Stories, (New York:  Ticknor & Fields, 1991), p. 47.

White City featured several roller coasters, a chute-the-chutes, two ballrooms, inexpensive food, and its landmark Electric Tower. Partly due to a large fire in the late 1920s, and partly due to the economic hardship of the Depression, much of White City’s amusements had been shut down by the mid-1930s. Stiff competition from the growing Cottage Grove entertainment district, particularly the new Trianon Ballroom, also drew entertainment-seekers away from the park. In 1937, only one dance hall, the roller rink, the basketball courts, and the bowling alleys remained in operation. White City closed for good in the 1950s.

Located in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, the 1893 Exposition was known as “the White City” for its gleaming white, Beaux-Arts style buildings designed by famed architect Daniel Burnham, famous for designing the Flatiron Building in New York, among many others, and the renowned firm of McKim, Mead & White, famous for the now-lost Pennsylvania Station in New York among many others. The buildings of the so-called White City dotted a lagoon reminiscent of Venice.  Only two of the buildings from the World’s Fair survive to this day in their original location: the Palace of Fine Arts, which is now the Museum of Science and Industry; and the World’s Congress Auxiliary Building, which is now the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Stepping off the cable car that had brought him from the Loop, he stood on the Hyde Park prairie Paul Cornell had plated and drained, between Olmsted’s Washington and Jackson Parks, gazing with disappointment at the ‘unfinished gray stone buildings scattered loosely over the immense campus which was nothing more than a quagmire with a frog pond at the south end.’  Just a few blocks east of this chaotic construction scene, he could see the vastly larger building site of the great fair Chicago would host.  They stood next to each other, connected by Olmsted’s Midway Plaisance, two miniature cities in the making, Burnham’s White City and Harper’s Gray City, both of them planned by ‘ardent, ambitious businessmen eager to change the city’s image from one of barbarous materialism to one of refinement and culture.’”—Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 394.

The Exposition drew more than 27 million visitors from all over the world, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, social reformer Jane Addams, writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, writer Henry Blake Fuller, and composer Scott Joplin.

The Dodecanese are a chain of islands in the Aegean Sea just off the western coast of Turkey. The name “Dodecanese” means “twelve islands” in Greek.  While there are over 150 islands in the chain only a couple of dozen are inhabited.  The name for the chain comes from the twelve largest of these islands.

From the 1500′s to 1912, the chain was controlled by the Ottoman Turks, but were seized by the Italians in that year. After World War II, the Greeks regained control of the Dodecanese.

The most famous of the islands in the Dodecanese is probably Rhodes with the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, in ancient times, and the Knights Hospitaller (later the Knights of Malta after they lost the Siege of Rhodes in 1480) operating from their base on the island during the Middle Ages. In a famous incident in Ancient Roman times, recounted in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Julius Caesar was kidnapped in his youth by pirates off the Dodecanese.