The American South :: American History States Papers

The American SouthSo youve moved, or been moved, to the South. Or maybe youre thinking about it. Youre wondering What is this place? Whats different about it? Is it different, anymore? secure questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our livings by asking them, but we still dont agree about the answers. Lets impression at what might seem to be a simpler question Where is the South?Thats easy enough, isnt it? People more or slight agree about which split of the United States are in the South and which arent. If I gave you a list of states and asked which are Southern, all in all, chances are youd agree with some of my students, whose answers are summarized in Figure 1. I dont share their hesitation about Arkansas, and I think too many were ready to put Missouri in the South, but theres non a lot to argue with here.That tells us something. It tells us that the South is, to begin with, a concept and a shared one. Its an idea that people can verbalize about, think about, use to orient themselves and each other. People know whether theyre in it or not. As a geographer would put it, the South is a vernacular region. closure and think about that. Why should that be? Why can I write South with some assurance that youll know I mean capital of Virginia and dont mean Phoenix? What is it that the Souths boundaries enclose?Well, for starters, its not news that the South has been an economically and demographically distinctive place a poor, rural region with a biracial population, reflecting the past dominance of the plantation system. One thing the Souths boundaries have set off is a set of distinctive problems, growing out of that history. Those problems may be less and less obvious, but most are still with us to some extent, and we can still use them to locate the South.But the South is more than undecomposed a collection of unfavorable statistics. It has also been home to several populations, black and white, whose in tertwined cultures have set them off from other Americans as well as from each other. Some of us, in fact, have suggested that Southerners ought to be viewed as an American ethnic group, like Italian- or Polish-Americans. If we can use distinctive cultural attributes to find Southerners, whence we can say that the South is where they are found.