new haven dance party

For my first shout-out to Connecticut on You Do What You Can, I chose New Haven Dance Party’s city because it seems like THE famous Connecticut city of prestige. Sure, Hartford might be the capital, and Waterbury might be the city that I’m most familiar with, but as the first planned community of the original British New World settlements, the Elm City was the center of the New Haven Colony, one of the three original Connecticut colonies before uniting in 1664. If it weren’t for economic disaster in the mid-1600’s, it could have been nearly as prestigious of a trade city as Boston. It was actually co-capital of the state with Hartford until 1873, perhaps since Hartford was a more central locale (New Haven lies on the Long Island Sound coastline), and Roger Sherman, its first mayor, was the only founding father to sign the original U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and both Articles of Association and Confederation. New Haven also hosts the “other” Ivy League college, Yale, from which Eli Whitney graduated and set up shop nearby to manufacture the cotton gin and various armaments (it was this manufacturing plant where Samuel Colt also invented the revolver), and is the birthplace of the current U.S. president George W. Bush, when his father and former U.S. president George H. W. Bush attended Yale before graduating and relocating to Texas in pursuit of oil and riches.

Thank you, Wikipedia!