The Setting

This is the post I've been wanting to get to the most because I get to put pictures in it.


Lee and Cameron are from Shawnee, Ohio. Shawnee was founded in 1873 and was the largest town in Perry County for a very long time. It was based on the lucrative coal mining industry that sustained it throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century. As the coal mining industry began to fail, so did Shawnee; it is now classified as a semi-ghost town and was home to only 608 people in 2000. An overwhelming number of those people were white: 606 people out of 608 were Caucasian. 

The median income for a family in Shawnee is $37,000. The median income for a man over eighteen is $31,000 a year.

Baghdad is one of the oldest cities in the Middle Eastern World. It was the pinnacle of class during the Abbasid Caliphate and it was founded on the banks of the Tigris River in the 8th century. It remains to be home to 7-7.5 million people. Formerly, it was Saddam Hussein's stronghold, but it was the object of a United States (who were aided by a coalition of other countries) invasion that began the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in March 2003.

Baghdad and Shawnee: don't think I could have found two greater, more different places.