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In this blog you can read a complete record of the visits we have made to The United States since march 2007.
Each of our trips has its own blog site Blog site. However we have now brought them all together onto our main Blog Page.
Our last trip, with a current name: Road Blog Spring 2013 is now complete.


Sunday, March 29, 2009

Montgomery: Background

What a place. We have found out so much. I want to remember my experiences with people, but need to record what we saw and comment on the events that have made Montgomery so central to American History. Before today I thought that Montgomery was a backwater in the Deep South, should we even go there? As we moved north we began to find out about it. Montgomery is the State Capital of Alabama, which is in the centre of the Deep South. It was central to the construction and development of the Confederacy; it was the capital of the Confederacy for a short time. Before that it was the pivotal point where the French were forced to retreat from the British (1750). The British were forced to retreat from the Americans (1812 war) under General Jackson and the focal point of the war between the Cree Nation and America. It was the centre of the cotton growing industry and merchants and farmers became very rich. It also had a lot of slaves, I think because it was a long way from the sea (and easy communications) it felt a long way away from Washington, nearly 2000 miles by sea and 700 miles by land.
Anyway, there are two main spheres of history that Montgomery is famous for, both to do with emancipation, The Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.

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