Memphis spawned several of the most important musical forms of the 20th century, yet Nashville stole the Tennessee limelight with its country music. Ask the average American what makes Memphis special, and he or she might be able to tell you that this is the city of Graceland, Elvis Presley's mansion. What they're less likely to know is that Memphis is also the birthplace of the blues, rock 'n' roll, and soul music. Memphis is where W. C. Handy put down on paper the first written blues music; where the King made his first recording; and where Otis Redding and Al Green expressed the music in their souls. Many fans of American music (and they come from all over the world) know Memphis. Walking down Beale Street today, sitting in the Sun Studio Cafe, or waiting to pass through the wrought-iron gates of Graceland, you're almost as likely to hear French, German, and Japanese as you are to hear English. British, Irish, and Scottish accents are all common in a city known throughout the world as the birthplace of the most important musical styles of the 20th century. For these people, a trip to Memphis is a pilgrimage. The Irish rock band U2 came here to pay homage and wound up infusing their music with Americana on the record and movie U2: Rattle & Hum. Pilgrims come to Memphis not only because Graceland, the second most-visited home in America (after the White House), is here. They come because Beale Street was once home to Handy--and later, B. B. King, Muddy Waters, and others--who merged the gospel singing and cotton-field work songs of the Mississippi Delta into a music called the blues. They come because Sun Studio-owner Sam Phillips, in the early 1950s, began recording several young musicians who experimented with fusing the sounds of hillbilly (country) music and the blues into an entirely new sound. This uniquely American sound, first known as rockabilly, would quickly become known as rock 'n' roll, the music that has written the soundtrack for the baby-boom generation.

New Orleans, with its richly mottled old buildings, its sly, sophisticated - sometimes almost disreputable - air, and its Hispanic-Gallic traditions, has more the flavor of an old European capital than an American city. Townhouses in the French Quarter, with their courtyards and carriageways, are thought by some scholars to be related on a small scale to certain Parisian "hotels" - princely urban residences of the 17th and 18th centuries. Visitors particularly remember the decorative cast-iron balconies that cover many of these townhouses like ornamental filigree cages. European influence is also seen in the city's famous above-ground cemeteries. The practice of interring people in large, richly adorned above-ground tombs dates from the period when New Orleans was under Spanish rule. These hugely popular "cities of the dead" have been and continue to be an item of great interest to visitors. Mark Twain, noting that New Orleanians did not have conventional below-ground burials, quipped that "few of the living complain and none of the other." The spine of Uptown, and much of New Orleans, is the city's grand residential rue, St. Charles Avenue, which was aptly described in the novel "A Confederacy of Dunces": "The ancient oaks of St. Charles Avenue arched over the avenue like a canopy... St. Charles Avenue must be the loveliest place in the world. From time to time... passed the slowly rocking streetcars that seemed to be leisurely moving toward no special destinations, following their route through the old mansions on either side... Everything looked so calm, so prosperous." The streetcars in question, the St. Charles Line, represent the nation's only surviving historic streetcar system. All 35 electric cars were manufactured by the Brill & Perley Thomas Company between 1922 and 1924 and are still in use - truly a national treasure. Creole cottages and shotgun houses dominate the scene in many New Orleans neighborhoods. Both have a murky ancestry. The Creole cottage, two rooms wide and two or more rooms deep under a generous pitched roof with a front overhang or gallery, is thought to have evolved from various European and Caribbean forms. The shotgun house is one room wide and two, three or four rooms deep under a continuous gable roof. As legend has it, the name was suggested by the fact that because the rooms and doors line up, one can fire a shotgun through the house without hitting anything. Some scholars have suggested that shotguns evolved from ancient African "long-houses," but no one really knows. It is true that shotguns represent a distinctively Southern house type. They are also found in the form of plantation quarters houses. Unlike shotgun houses in much of the South, which are fairly plain, New Orleans shotguns fairly bristle with Victorian jigsaw ornament, especially prominent, florid brackets. Indeed, in many ways New Orleans shotguns are as much a signature of the city as the French Quarter. One of the truly amazing aspects of New Orleans architecture is the sheer number of historic homes and buildings per square mile. New Orleanians never seem to replace anything. Consider this, Uptown, the city's largest historic district, has almost 11,000 buildings, 82 percent of which were built before 1935 - truly a "time warp." New Orleans' architectural character is unlike that of any other American city. A delight to both natives and visitors, it presents such a variety that even after many years of study, one can still find things unique and undiscovered.

Saint Paul, Minnesota’s capital city, is a marriage of the old, the new and the unique! Visitors marvel at Saint Paul’s Old World charm. Saint Paul’s Summit Avenue boasts one of the longest stretches of virtually uninterrupted Victorian architecture in the United States--beginning at the European-style Saint Paul Cathedral and running to the Mississippi River. Downtown Saint Paul features a number of historic buildings including the State Capitol, the Fitzgerald Theater (home to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion), the Landmark Center, the Saint Paul Hotel, and breathtaking views of the Mississippi River. Saint Paul is bursting with new buildings and ideas. Saint Paul’s renaissance is borne out in the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Xcel Energy Center (home of the Minnesota Wild) and the refurbished Harriet Island Regional Park. Invented in 1962 in Minneapolis, Saint Paul’s skyways are enclosed pedestrian walkways that connect virtually all of downtown and keep visitors comfortable no matter what the weather brings. Saint Paul is surrounded by blue! Blue water that is. The city sits on the bluffs overlooking the mighty Mississippi River; and visitors are just minutes away from some of the most scenic urban lakes in the U.S.