Quote:
Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin
The gist of it seems to be that a place can be culturally Southern, historically Southern, and/or geographically Southern. The latter two are of course fixed, but culture is more fluid.
Virginia will always be part of the historic South, while Geographically it's more mid-Atlanic than Southern, strictly speaking. Culturally though, it seems to be more aligned with Northern states now.
Personally, I see it more as being part of the "New South" along with Georgia and North Carolina rather than being "not the South". That, or maybe more accurately its just become an extension of the North with most of the population living in the DC suburbs.
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I agree with the first two paragraphs, but disagree with the third. The only reason Virginia is lumped in with North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia is because of the old, antiquated Confederacy connection people keep peddling.
From a "human connection" perspective, Virginia is culturally, economically, and socially tied to the North. Northern Virginia is an urban appendage of the North (no different culturally from Maryland, which everyone treats as obviously Northern). And like a chain Richmond is linked to Northern Virginia, and Hampton Roads is linked to Richmond.
That's the Virginia urban crescent. And with the growth of Virginia, that urban crescent is coalescing into a single urban region:
Conversely, there are very few ties between Richmond and Raleigh (not even a rail connection, which wasn't even on the radar until recently). In fact, there's a gigantic mental wall between the two, because from Richmond to Raleigh (2.5 hours) there's a whole lot of nothing. I could see Virginia as part of the New South if its urban landscape were a part of the "Piedmont Atlantic" megaregion above. But Virginians don't orient South, but North.