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Old 07-20-2007, 12:47 AM
 
Location: St. Louis, MO
3,742 posts, read 8,339,575 times
Reputation: 660

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Louisvilleslugger View Post
Well here is a repost to reaffirm my stance that Kentucky and Louisville are Southern!
Just be careful about those maps and make sure not to include Missouri in the South, because it is not a Southern state and IMO never was to begin with...slave state does not necessarily equate to Southern....especially given that in that map there very few slaves existed in Missouri and its economy never warranted it. It is ridiculous to call Kentucky a border state, especially today, same with Missouri. Missouri pretty became a Midwestern state after the Civil War as opposed to neutral before, and Kentucky joined the South. West Virginia stayed neutral, Maryland either stayed neutral or pretty much became Northeastern. Calling a state a border state today IMO is the same thing as calling a city a town based on its size 100 years ago. Completely out of context. Kentucky is not a border state...plain and simple. Northern Kentucky is basically the same outlier in the state as the parts of Missouri below and around U.S. Highway 60 and the bootheel. Both are cultural outliers from the rest of the state and comprise only about 10 to 20% of each of the states. In addition, ask people from the states who consider themselves Southern. the University of North Carolina conducted a survey of over 200 people from different parts of each of the so-called border states of the Civil War. Missouri had 77% identify as Midwestern, only 23% as Southern...that pretty much settles the question there. Kentucky had 70-80% identify as Southern, Maryland and Delaware had above or near 70% identify as Northeastern...again that pretty much settles the question there. Virginia was decisively southern if I remember. West Virginia I don't remember. But I can tell you that the results from the 200 people from each state pretty much decisively group their state in a specific region.

 
Old 07-20-2007, 01:54 AM
 
Location: Kentucky
666 posts, read 2,525,652 times
Reputation: 280
Quote:
Originally Posted by texmexandproud View Post
Here's my proposal--these count as the South:
-Tennessee (more than 20 minutes south of Kentucky)
-North Carolina (in towns and rural areas with fewer than 75,000 people)
-Florida (north of I-10 then the Gulf Coast west of Panama City)
-Arkansas (south of I-30/I-40 east of Little Rock)
-South Carolina
-Georgia
-Alabama
-Mississippi
-Louisiana

Do not count:
-Texas: it's so great, it's its own region and country. It's like eight states in one with ten different cultures and types of topography.
-Virginia: It is now a mid-Atlantic state.
-West Virginia: hillbilly and country doesn't mean southern. And, they say "pop." More industrial in history, like the northeast and upper midwest.
-Kentucky: They say "pop," don't know what grits and sweet tea are, and it doesn't have a great deal of that Southern hospitality. Ever been to Louisville, Lexington, and Owensboro?-Arkansas: western Arkansas is more like Oklahoma and east Texas.
-Florida: south of I-10, it's now New York South
okay, the kentucky part...WHERE IN KENTUCKY DOES ANYONE SAY "POP"????, i moved there from ohio and got made fun of for callin coke or soda, POP. as for sweet tea, try and find someplace around here where they DONT serve sweet tea. And as for the grits, go to any Waffle House and you can get as much grits as you want. Maybe you should know a little more about what your talking about before you post it...
 
Old 07-20-2007, 07:25 AM
 
Location: Kentucky
6,749 posts, read 22,003,297 times
Reputation: 2178
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdawg View Post
okay, the kentucky part...WHERE IN KENTUCKY DOES ANYONE SAY "POP"????, i moved there from ohio and got made fun of for callin coke or soda, POP. as for sweet tea, try and find someplace around here where they DONT serve sweet tea. And as for the grits, go to any Waffle House and you can get as much grits as you want. Maybe you should know a little more about what your talking about before you post it...
Thank you!!!! By the way, where in KY are you?
 
Old 07-20-2007, 08:58 AM
 
Location: Washington D.C. By way of Texas
20,501 posts, read 33,325,658 times
Reputation: 12109
Quote:
Originally Posted by AT205 View Post
For people including Texas, I never encounter Texans referring themselves as a "South state", but the "Southwest". It might sound ridiculous.

But there's quite a difference I think. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, etc., does not have the large Mexican culture that Texas does. I think that makes a big difference between us.

I had a brother-n-law's family from the northeast who thought that everyone here owns a horse , even in the large cities. I understand rural areas, but large cities?

At the same time. If you were to travel on a highway from Louisiana to Texas on a highway and not see a sign stating you are leaving Louisiana for Texas, would you really know the difference? And culturally, East Texas down to SE Texas has alot in common with Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. But it starts to go away the closer you get to I-35.
 
Old 07-20-2007, 11:51 AM
 
10,238 posts, read 19,512,599 times
Reputation: 5943
Quote:
Originally Posted by AT205 View Post
For people including Texas, I never encounter Texans referring themselves as a "South state", but the "Southwest". It might sound ridiculous.

But there's quite a difference I think. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, etc., does not have the large Mexican culture that Texas does. I think that makes a big difference between us.

I had a brother-n-law's family from the northeast who thought that everyone here owns a horse , even in the large cities. I understand rural areas, but large cities?

Actually, if one goes by the results of 14 years of the "Southern Focus Poll" that Louisville has cited, then 86% percent of Texas residents surveyed said they lived in the South, while 68% considered themselves to be Southerners (this "gap" existed in all the Southern states, even the DEEP deep South. Probably to some extent due to northern transplants who replied and did not think of themselves personally as "Southern"). In another poll, which was published in the "Annals of the Association of American Geographers" over 71 percent of Texans responding chose "South" over "West" as their regional affiliation.

The "Southwest" thing has always been a bit of a puzzler in many ways. Its use has a long standing in Texas, but what has to be remembered is that it origins referred more to "western South" than a cultural and or historic kinship with the true desert Southwest of New Mexico or Arizona. That is, Southwest as applied to most of Texas was generally meant in a way which distinished it from the Old ante-bellum South or Southeast (which included East Texas), but not the South itself. In other words, a sub-region of the "Greater South."

There is a good point to be made however, about the large hispanic population and yes, in a lot of ways, it has had the effect of evolving south Texas and far western Texas. But still, this is a fairly recent phenomenon and too, there is no telling how much of this new immigration is actually legal!
 
Old 07-20-2007, 12:18 PM
 
10,238 posts, read 19,512,599 times
Reputation: 5943
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spade View Post
At the same time. If you were to travel on a highway from Louisiana to Texas on a highway and not see a sign stating you are leaving Louisiana for Texas, would you really know the difference? And culturally, East Texas down to SE Texas has alot in common with Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. But it starts to go away the closer you get to I-35.

This is absolutely true (although I substitute Alabama in place of Arkansas as concerns East Texas! ) I get out that way quite a bit, and I had a guy from Mississippi once tell me that if not for the license plates on the cars, he would have a hard time telling he wasn't back home. Another guy, this one from Georgia, who had moved to East Texas to take a job with a local college said he was truly surprised, as all his images of Texas had come from those old western movies (which actually were filmed in Arizona and southern California). Instead, he said to the effect of "This is the Deep South. there is no real difference I can think of between where I came from and where I live now."

As Spade said, these absolute similarites tend to fade the further west one travels. However, North, Central, and most of West Texas were settled primarily by those from the eastern Southern states looking to get a new start. For that reason, even though, topographically speaking, it doesn't much resemble the forested South, it is still essentially the South in most important ways (the map Louisville posted of the Bible Belt and the domination of the Baptist Church, and dialect are very good examples).
 
Old 07-20-2007, 09:24 PM
 
Location: Washington D.C. By way of Texas
20,501 posts, read 33,325,658 times
Reputation: 12109
Quote:
Originally Posted by TexasReb View Post
The "Southwest" thing has always been a bit of a puzzler in many ways. Its use has a long standing in Texas, but what has to be remembered is that it origins referred more to "western South" than a cultural and or historic kinship with the true desert Southwest of New Mexico or Arizona. That is, Southwest as applied to most of Texas was generally meant in a way which distinished it from the Old ante-bellum South or Southeast (which included East Texas), but not the South itself. In other words, a sub-region of the "Greater South."
:
And this is why I believe the term "southwest," is slowly dying and being replaced with south-central which are the states of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. It makes more sense, imo, than south-west. If you want to put west and south with Texas in anything. You say it is the Western portion of the "Greater South."
 
Old 07-21-2007, 12:54 AM
 
Location: St. Louis, MO
3,742 posts, read 8,339,575 times
Reputation: 660
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spade View Post
And this is why I believe the term "southwest," is slowly dying and being replaced with south-central which are the states of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. It makes more sense, imo, than south-west. If you want to put west and south with Texas in anything. You say it is the Western portion of the "Greater South."
I don't think Texas and Oklahoma go in the same category as Arkansas and Louisiana. Oklahoma to me is a true hybrid state. It is Midwestern, Southern, and Southwestern all at the same time and it is also a Great Plains state. Texas is Southern, Southwestern, and a Great Plains state. Arkansas and Louisiana are not part of the "Greater South" for goodness sake...they are 100% Southern and definitely a part of the South. Texas and Oklahoma I've always thought are very different from both of these states.
 
Old 07-21-2007, 01:09 AM
 
Location: Washington D.C. By way of Texas
20,501 posts, read 33,325,658 times
Reputation: 12109
Google south central united states and see what states you get. Here is why I say this. Texas has more in common with Louisiana and Arkansas than it does with New Mexico and Arizona. And Texas is also part of the south. It is not in any other region. It is not in the west, nor the midwest. And just because we are saying "greater south" does not mean we aren't saying it isn't southern.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a0/US_map-South_Central.PNG (broken link)
 
Old 07-21-2007, 11:47 AM
 
10,238 posts, read 19,512,599 times
Reputation: 5943
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spade View Post
Google south central united states and see what states you get. Here is why I say this. Texas has more in common with Louisiana and Arkansas than it does with New Mexico and Arizona. And Texas is also part of the south. It is not in any other region. It is not in the west, nor the midwest. And just because we are saying "greater south" does not mean we aren't saying it isn't southern.
Of course it doesn't. "Greater South" in this context refers to what the various sub-regions of the South form collectively. I think I mentioned previously that great work of cultural sociology by Raymond Gastil titled "Cultural Regions of the United States." It has been a while since I read it, but he outlines such parts as "Western South" (which was most of Texas and southern and eastern parts of Oklahoma). Then there was "Lower South" which stretched from East Texas into South Carolina and other bordered areas. Then there was the "Upper South" which included mountainous areas of Arkansas, Tennennesse, Kentucy and Virginia. Point being, all these areas collectively made up the "Greater South."

And Spade is right that Texas definitely has more in common with Arkansas and Louisiana than with New Mexico and Arizona in just about every important way. Not the least of which is that those two states contributed heavily to original Texas settlement and brought with them their culture. On the other hand westward "Southern migration" pretty well ended at the Texas -New Mexico border.

The shaping formations in New Mexico and Arizona (which did not even become states until the early 20th century) was very much dominated by hispanic and Native-American influences. Whereas in Texas, it was anglo and black Southerners. Granted, often these two dual cultures were sometimes very much at odds with each other in some very unfortunate ways, but even the long existence of "Jim Crow" laws in Texas is indicitive of how the state is essentially Southern by history, traditions and customs.
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