Quote:
Originally Posted by CVG
Much like the person earlier talking about there being 2 Midwests, there are also 2 Souths. The Deep South which KY and TN are not (outside of the Memphis region) - and I guess what you would call the Upper South. Once you hit Birmingham/Atlanta and go south it has always felt different to me that the areas north.
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There's more than two different "Souths", actually, which relates to the regions' settlement patterns and the amount that the regions subsequently coalesced into a unified identity. Off the top of my head, we have:
1. Tidewater. This is the oldest "South", and is the South found historically in Virginia, the Carolinas, and on the Delmarva Peninsula and in southern Maryland. Pockets of Tidewater can be found in Georgia (Savannah) and even in New Jersey (Salem Country). Tidewater culture developed as an agrarian plantation-based society with a heavy reliance on cash crops, whether tobacco as was the case in Virginia or rice as was the case in the Carolinas. During the American Revolution, Tidewater was one of the three divergent identities in the Thirteen Colonies. While historically prevalent, Tidewater has been shrinking for the past half century (at least!), as its northern periphery gets swallowed by the Northeast -- a process that likely began with the development of Baltimore as an industrial center -- and one which is also assimilating the bulk of its historical urban areas (Richmond, Fredericksburg, the Hampton Roads).
2. The Deep South. This is the "South" we think of when we think of the South, but it is also very much an antebellum development, one that took the Tidewater agrarian slave economy to new extremes with a new cash crop -- cotton. At the time of the Civil War, the heart of the Deep South was in a large bottomland region known as the Mississippi Delta, which spreads across much of Arkansas and Mississippi and into Tennessee and perhaps the southernmost peripheries of the adjoining states as well. Nowadays, its cultural capital has clearly moved to Atlanta, with its main conurbations spreading along the piedmont northeast of there.
3. The Bayou Bottomlands. This region has a different settlement history entirely: centered on New Orleans, of the major cities of New France (and subsequently New Spain), it retains a much more European flavor, one unlike anything else found in the South (or in America in general, for that matter). The Bayou has a different accent, a different cuisine, different values, and different everything relative to Tidewater or the Deep South, but has largely gotten subsumed into the surrounding Southern cultures.
4. Appalachia. The Appalachian Mountains function as a boundary between the Northeastern regions and Midwest in the North, and developed its own distinct subculture, one which subsequently spread along the early pioneer roads and the highlands surrounding the Ohio Valley. Appalachia, as a cultural region, can loosely be identified as the montane region to the east, the Ozarks and Ouachitas to the west, and the Cumberland and Tennessee river valleys in between, making Nashville the dominant center of Appalachian culture. It is also worth nothing here that there are some subtle differences between Northern and Southern reflexes of Appalachian identity, though these reflexes are perhaps becoming lost nowadays. Appalachia isn't really "Northern" or "Southern" in the sense that it didn't develop out of either the urban cultures of New England or the Mid-Atlantic, as Northern cultures did, or the agrarian culture of Tidewater, as Southern culture did, but rather developed in the backwoods on the peripheries of both and expanded to fill the buffer region in between.
5. Texas. Much like how the Deep South is Tidewater's baby, Texas is the Deep South's baby. Texas is also characterized by a strong Hispanic influence, indicative of how the region was first settled by Spain before Southern pioneers began emigrating over the Mexican border and subsequently forcing Texas' independence from the Mexican Empire. While the Bayou Bottomlands may be the most
different Southern culture, Texas is the most bombastic and the one with the strongest national aspirations of its own (i.e. Texas tends to see itself as an integral
nation in the anthropological sense more than any other Southern culture). This may also be helped by the fact that Texas' cultural borders are roughly analogous to Texas' state borders, something that tends to be quite unusual in the political vs. anthropological subdivision of the United States.