fieldwork

I've spent the last 5 days in New Orleans and the last 12 hours traversing southern lands, finally landing at the southernmost point of my home state of Illinois--a city called Cairo (pronounced, ahem, KAY-ro), along the mighty Mississippi River belt. For several hazy reasons which I have researched exclusively on Wikipedia, many names of cities along the Mississippi have Greek, Middle Eastern, or Egyptian origins. The whole region is referred to as "Little Egypt" due to its geographic likeness to the Nile River delta, but also because of its rampant and uniformly impassioned loyalty to the Confederacy during the Civil War. The northern regions of Illinois voted with Lincoln, and the southern half of the state sided unanimously with...the South. During a debate in 1858, Douglas threatened Lincoln he would "trot him down to Little Egypt" and challenge Abe to repeat his antislavery stance to see how he fared there. So...Illinois's Little Egypt is so named, in part, because ancient Egypt was unanimously proslavery...and so was the southern half of Illinois in 1858. In which case Stephen Douglas was making what we call a metaphor, a device commonly employed in debates.

Tomorrow we will explore.