Michael Kazin Quotations

The Sun Belt would not have become such a dynamic, urban, industrial region if it hadn't been for air conditioning. Before 1945, before the 1950s, the South was a pretty sleepy area, industrially.

Once the majority of Americans became middle class, once their jobs ceased to be manual jobs, then they began to look around and choose to live in a place, in part, because of the weather.

Americans have wanted to move to places where the weather fit their clothes, as the old saying goes, where you could live an athletic life year-round.

It's a war only because we've got the rhetoric of wartime.