1 Geography

The region is blessed with plentiful rainfall and a mild to warm climate. Many kinds of crops grow easily in its soils and can be grown without frost for at least six months of the year. The South has many fragrant magnolia trees and jessamine vines and beautiful flowering dogwoods.

2 History

Like New England, the South was settled by English Protestants. Indeed, the first permanent colony began in Jamestown, Virginia in 1606, 14 years before the landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The South received the continent's largest population of enslaved Africans from New England traders. In some states, their descendants outnumbered people of European descent in the 19th century. Whereas New Englanders tended to stress their differences from the British, Southern whites tended to emulate them. Even so, Southerners were prominent among the leaders of the American Revolution, and four of America's first five Presidents were Virginians. After 1800, however, the interests of the manufacturing North and the agrarian South began to diverge.

Especially in coastal areas, southern settlers grew wealthy by raising and selling rice, indigo, cotton, and tobacco. The most economical way to raise these crops was on large farms, called plantations, which required the work of many laborers. To supply this need, American and British slavers purchased slaves in Africa to plantation owners and slavery spread throughout the South. The slavers bought the slaves with vats of rum made in New England from cane sugar grown in the Caribbean. This exchange of sugar, rum, and slaves is called the " Triangular Trade."

Slavery was the most contentious issue dividing North and South. The vast majority of Southerners never owned slaves; most were independent yeoman farmers just like their counterparts in the North, and slavery was not part of everyday life for ordinary citizens. But that said, the huge slave-run plantations of the Deep South were not to be found anywhere else. Political tensions arose for a number of reasons, especially slavery. Slavery was a moral issue that angered the North, but Southern planters faced total financial ruin if it were abolished, and in 1860, eleven Southern states left the Union and formed a separate nation, the Confederate States of America. War broke out, called in the North, the American Civil War, and called by some in the South, the "War for Southern Independence," "The War Between the States," and "The War of Northern Agression." The variations are indicative of the differning perceptions of the war in the South. The war was fought mostly on Southern lands, which prompted a Southern Belle to quip, "There was nothing civil about it," – an observation that holds true for intranational conflicts in general. Out-gunned, out-manned, and out-financed, the Confederacy met defeat, and slavery came to an end. During the war, the pro-Union northwestern region of Confederate Virginia seceded to become the new state of West Virginia. Several other Southern states also had areas with strong Union sympathies; generally these were upland areas where plantation-style agriculture and hence widespread slvary had never been feasible. The abolition of slavery failed to provide Africans with political or economic equality: Southern states, towns, and cities legalized and refined the practice of racial segregation. For a long period thereafter, well into the 20th century, the South enforced regional white supremacy through Jim Crow laws, segregation, sharecropping, disenfranchisement and domestic terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 devastated the Old South socially and economically. Before the war, the South was the wealthiest part of the United States – bearing much of that wealth in land and slaves. After the war, during the Reconstruction period, the South struggled to rise from poverty and worked to establish a successful economy from the ashes. Richmond, Virginia, the former Capital of the Confederacy, grew quickly mostly due to its railroads, canals, and cutting edge electric trolley system, and later its Federal Reserve Bank. Sometime after World War II, the old agrarian Southern economy evolved into the " New South" – a manufacturing region with strong roots in Northern-style financial capitalism. High-rise buildings now crowd the skylines of Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Dallas, Nashville, and Little Rock. In the 20th century, the South saw an impressive regional outpouring of literature by William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Andrew Nelson Lytle , Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, among others.

3 Culture

As the effects of slavery and racial loyalty disappear, a new regional identity is being carefully crafted under the banner of the aforementioned "New South" through such events as the hip annual Spoleto Music Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Although the South as a whole defies stereotyping, it is nonetheless known for entrenched political conservatism, for its Calvinist religious " fundamentalism", and for vestiges of nostalgia toward the old rural South still present in events like Confederate Memorial Day, groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and small intellectual movements such as the revisionist " League of the South" and the Southern Agrarians.

Southern American cuisine is still somewhat distinctive. The Southern midday and evening meal tends still to consist of the "meat and three", usually a simple meat preparation such as meat loaf, baked ham, or fried pork chops, and three "vegetables" (a term often stretched to include macaroni and cheese, fried apples, Jello salad, and the like). Vegetables which are truly such are often flavored with lard or other fats and cooked for long periods, far longer than would be customary in other styles of cooking. Beverages of choice include "sweet tea", iced tea which is sweetened with large quantities of sugar while it is being brewed, and various soft drinks, many of which (like Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper) had their origins in the South. This diet contains an unhealthy level of fat if consumed regularly, especially by persons with sedentary lifestyles, and is one of the main reasons that the South is associated with obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes being more endemic even than in the rest of North America. Traditional Southern food is often called " soul food" and associated primarily with African-Americans in the rest of the U.S.; in reality there is little difference between the traditional diets of white and black Southerners except that the diets of the latter are more apt to include offal dishes such as chitterlings ("chitlins"). Of course, most Southern cities and even some smaller towns now offer a wide variety of cuisines of other origins such as Chinese, Mexican, and Italian, as well as restaurants still serving primarily or solely Southern specialites. See: Southern U.S. cuisine

The South, probably more than any other industrially advanced society in the world, is highly religious, and politicians and sociologists often refer to it as the " Bible Belt" due to the prevelance of evangelical Protestantism and other conservative Christian faiths being held in predomiance. The Southern conservative seldom identifies with the Democratic Party any longer, and since the Reagan era almost all have switched loyalties to the Republican Party, in large measure due to its open courting of the evangelical Christian vote, largely rewriting its platform to accomodate the views of this group in a way that is highly unlikely to be emulated by the Democrats. Unlike modern Southern public schools, churches and neighborhoods are still largely segregated voluntarily, especially in rural areas; in some areas affluent suburbs are now largely racially integrated, and a small but increasing number of churches are as well.

Fights over the old "Rebel Flag" of the defunct Confederacy still occur from time to time, and it and other reminders of the Old South can be seen everywhere on automobile bumper-stickers, on t-shirts, and flown from homes. However, these remnants are slowly fading away in urban and suburban areas, and Southern accents are heard ever-less often in the larger growing cities, and the South is clearly merging into the greater commercial culture of the whole United States.

4 Exceptions and Variations

• Southern Louisiana, having been colonized by France and Spain rather than Great Britain, has a different culture and traditions, especially with the Cajun culture of southwest Louisiana, and the Creole French, Latin American and Caribbean influenced culture of the New Orleans area. While the Gulf Coast regions of Alabama, Mississippi, and northern Florida share a similar French/Spanish colonial history, but there is less evidence of this in the local culture.

• Texas was a dependency of New Spain, but was originally claimed for France, became its own "Kingdom of Texas" under the Spanish, then part of Mexico, and lastly the independent Republic of Texas. After being annexed by the United States, it sided with the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. There have been " six flags" over Texas. In many ways Texas has one foot in the South, and one in the Southwest. The major cities, especially Houston, see a very diverse population, especially that of Hispanic- and Asian-Americans.

• Florida has had rapid population growth due to retirees from the North and immigrants from Latin America. Miami, Florida has become more a part of the culture of the Caribbean, with a large influx of immigrants from Cuba, and also Puerto Rico, Haiti and other parts of Latin America, as non-Hispanic whites and native-born African Americans have fled north to find higher wages, lower costs of living, and cultures where they feel more comfortable. While southern and central Florida is seen by many as not truly part of the U.S. South in terms of culture, the areas of northeast Florida and the Panhandle still, for the most part, hold Southern traditions and ways-of-life dear.

• The culture of Northern Kentucky is more Midwestern than Southern; the region is culturally and economically attached to Cincinnati. Conversely, Southern Indiana is more Southern than it is Midwestern, as it is culturally and economically attached to Louisville, Kentucky. Similarly, Southern Illinois ( Little Egypt) is more Southern than it is Midwestern; it forms a coherent cultural region with the Missouri Bootheel, northeast Arkansas, Kentucky's Purchase, and West Tennessee.

• Many do not consider Maryland and Delaware to be culturally Southern states, but the designation is disputed due to their proximity to both North and South. Those who see them as Southern cite the fact that although neither joined the Confederacy, slavery remained legal in them unitl the end of the Civil War in 1865, and that the Mason-Dixon line, long considered to be the border between North and South, is in fact the Maryland- Pennsylvania border. Today, they are sometimes grouped with Southern states for corporate and governmental administrative regions. However, Baltimore, Maryland, Wilmington, Delaware, and Newark, Delaware, lie along the Northeast Corridor that spans Washington, D.C. , Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, which further separates them from the South, and ties them to a culture that has little in common with Southern culture.

• Northern Virginia has been largely settled by Northerners attracted to job opportunities resulting from expansion of the federal government during and after World War II. Still more expansion resulted from the Internet boom around the turn of the 21st century. Economically it is linked to Washington, D.C.. Residents of the region tend to consider it part of the North, as do Southerners. However, it remains politically somewhat conservative, as opposed to the Maryland suburbs of Washington across the Potomac River, which are generally politically quite liberal.

• Prior to its statehood in 1907, Oklahoma was " Indian Territory." The majority of the Native American tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Oklahoma is similar to Texas in that it has a Southwestern influence. Still it has a strong Southern cultural feel as evidenced by dialect, religion, politics, cuisine, etc. It is geographically often grouped with the Midwest, but culturally is truly more Southern, especially in the eastern part of the state.

5 See also

• Deep South
• Border states

Regions of the United States
Census Bureau Regions
U.S. Midwest | U.S. Northeast | U.S. South | U.S. West
Non-Census Bureau Regions
Coastal states | Deep South | Delmarva | East | Eastern Seaboard | Gulf States | Great Lakes States | International Border states | Mid-Atlantic | Mississippi Delta | Mountain States | New England | North | Pacific Northwest | the Plains States | South Central States | Southeast | Southwest | Upper Midwest | West | West Coast

U.S. South

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