Charlotte North Carolina

The rapid evolution of Charlotte, North Carolina, from “regional backwater” to globally ascendant city provides stark contrasts of then and now. Once a regional manufacturing and textile center, Charlotte stands today as one of the nation's premier banking and financial cores with interests reaching broadly into global markets. Once defined by its biracial and bicultural character, Charlotte is now an emerging immigrant gateway drawing newcomers from Latin America and across the globe. Once derided for its sleepy, nine-to-five “uptown,” Charlotte's center city has been wholly transformed by residential gentrification, corporate headquarters construction, and amenity-based redevelopment. And yet, despite its rapid transformation, Charlotte remains distinctively southern—globalizing, not yet global. This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars and local experts to examine Charlotte from multiple angles. Their topics include the banking industry, gentrification, boosterism, architecture, city planning, transit, public schools, NASCAR, and the African American and Latino communities. United in the conviction that the experience of this Sunbelt city—center of the nation's fifth-largest metropolitan area—offers new insight into today's most pressing urban and suburban issues, the contributors to Charlotte, NC: The Global Evolution of a New South City ask what happens when the external forces of globalization combine with a city's internal dynamics to reshape the local structures, landscapes, and identities of a southern place.

As in many cities in the early 20th-century South, the African-American citizens of Charlotte created their own society that mirrored the larger white community. Yet, black Charlotte was always self-sustaining, with its own schools, library, and businesses. Second Ward High School (1923-1969) was the area's first high school for blacks, and although the school and much of its surroundings have since been razed, the photo archive at the Second Ward Alumni House Museum helps keep alive the memories of the school and the entire black community.

The stories told by many generations of Charlotte's African American residents mingle strength and hardship, accomplishment and setback, joy and pain. Through slavery, through war, through Jim Crow segregation and into the 21st century Black residents from all walks of life have played essential roles in making Charlotte the city it is today. Everyone needs to know this history.

The rapid evolution of Charlotte, North Carolina, from “regional backwater” to globally ascendant city provides stark contrasts of then and now. Once a regional manufacturing and textile center, Charlotte stands today as one of the nation’s premier banking and financial cores with interests reaching broadly into global markets. Once defined by its biracial and bicultural character, Charlotte is now an emerging immigrant gateway drawing newcomers from Latin America and across the globe. Once derided for its sleepy, nine-to-five “uptown,” Charlotte’s center city has been wholly transformed by residential gentrification, corporate headquarters construction, and amenity-based redevelopment. And yet, despite its rapid transformation, Charlotte remains distinctively southern—globalizing, not yet global. This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars and local experts to examine Charlotte from multiple angles. Their topics include the banking industry, gentrification, boosterism, architecture, city planning, transit, public schools, NASCAR, and the African American and Latino communities. United in the conviction that the experience of this Sunbelt city—center of the nation’s fifth-largest metropolitan area—offers new insight into today’s most pressing urban and suburban issues, the contributors to Charlotte, NC: The Global Evolution of a New South City ask what happens when the external forces of globalization combine with a city’s internal dynamics to reshape the local structures, landscapes, and identities of a southern place.

Founded in 1768 at the crossing of two Indian trails, Charlotte has a rich heritage to match its age. Hear the personal voices of discovery, hardship, wars, privation, segregation and achievement from village to boomtown. In this extensively researched volume, accomplished author and historian Mary Kratt chronicles the history of Charlotte from the earliest Catawba inhabitants to the development of finance, culture and transportation, still centered on those ancient crossroads. Whether detailing the cotton fields and textile mills of yesterday or the banking center of tomorrow, Kratt's account is a fascinating history of the people who have made Charlotte a queen among southern cities.

While most American cities boomed decades, even centuries ago, the city of Charlotte does so now. However it is the Charlotte of old that is worth revisiting. It is this community that Charlotte natives remember fondly, but newcomers have never seen.

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Charlotte, "The Queen City" of North Carolina, was named in honor of King George III's wife, Queen Charlotte, and continues to be an important player in American history. From her early days as a pre-revolutionary hotbed of ideology to her modern incarnation as the nation's second-largest financial center, Charlotte is fascinating. See this Southern belle in all of her past and present glory in Charlotte Then & Now.- Discover Charlotte's beloved landmarks, past and present, in this unique tour of the "Hornet's Nest," a nickname bestowed on the rambunctious city by British general Cornwallis. Sports fans take note: Charlotte's pre-revolutionary legacy lives on in the NBA's Hornets.-Stop by the corner of Trade and Tryon Streets, better known as "The Square." It was at this intersection--where the original East-West Trading path crossed with the Great Wagon Road--that modern Charlotte began to take shape. Compare The Square as it was in 1898 with its modern reflection, and you'll notice it's still an important crossroad.-Charlotte is now America's #2 financial center, second only to New York. Throughout the centuries, banks have figured prominently in the city's diverse architecture-see beautiful examples in the Merchants and Farmers National Bank, First National Bank, and Wachovia Building as they werethen, and as they are now.-Spare any change? Before the California Gold Rush, Charlotte was a major gold town and even had its own mint. The Charlotte Mint was active until Confederate soldiers seized it; today the U.S. Mint building is one of Charlotte's most popular museums.