Author: Lauren

It’s hard to believe the Civil War came to a close almost 150 years ago. Luxury SUVs now cruise through the battlefields of Kennesaw, Georgia, where the Confederate troops made their last stand against the Union Army. General William Tecumseh Sherman would decimate the remainder of the Southern forces during the Battle of Kennesaw before his army would roll and fire its way into Atlanta in July of 1864. His war machine rolled through to Savannah effectively crumbling the South.

I remember when we first moved to Kennesaw, and my mother (a teacher for many years) asked her school’s assistant principal a question. “Why aren’t there any of those antebellum houses in Atlanta?”
“Miss Morgan!” he gasped. “Don’t you know that Damn Yankee Sherman burned them all?”

His words “Damn Yankee” stuck with me, as I spent my adolescent years growing up near the battlefields of Kennesaw Mountain. Margaret Mitchell wrote that Sherman was the villain in the stories she would hear about the decimation. Now, it’s almost the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta.
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Editor’s Note, this post originally appeared on “Not for Nothing Y’all” by the lovely Brittney Vasina.

If you had asked me to point out Atlanta on a map before I moved here from New York, I’m not sure I could do it. I had never really heard of the city. I guess I probably just knew it was in the South – and at that point, to me I believe the South was just simply a place where people farmed…to me it was a place that probably did not have electricity or internet. I’d never been, and was quite content with that fact. You can imagine the horror I felt when my parents told my sister and I that we were moving to Georgia…”Why would we do that?”

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Are you stocking up on books for the summer? We’ve got your new beach read – The Idea of Him by Holly Peterson. She’s the author of The N.Y. Times best-seller The Manny, kickass journalist, mom extraordinaire, and even an avid surfer.

I recently caught up with Miss Holly at the fabulous W Atlanta-Midotwn where we sipped “Idea-tinis” and talked about her writing, love life, and The Idea of Him. Her latest novel “explores the dangers of falling for the idea of a person, and why facing reality is more liberating than we ever dreamed it could be.”
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The lovely ladies at The Southern Women Channel have whipped up another video masterpiece with The Dixie Download. After their first video, Sh&t Southern Women Say, went viral with more than 5 million hits on YouTube, the former Southern girls who now reside in L.A. have started a regular YouTube series. My personal favorite lines from their latest installment include “What’s a Southern man’s idea of loading the dishwasher?” all of the “Dixie Dixtionary”, plus this joke “What’s smaller than a teeny weeny ant?”
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