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This issue comes up a lot on c vs. c but there is almost no difference in lifestyle between much of NoVa and New Jersey or metroWest Boston suburbs. You're far more likely to here a Central American accent than a Southern one. Yes, there is a connection to Southern history there, but no one walks around Reston Town Center or Clarendon calling people "Yankees".
Texas is not in the American South. Texas is Texas...its own nation, its own region. It’s an amalgamation of Southwestern, Midwestern/Great Plains, Mexican, Spanish, Tejano, Tex-Mex, Southern, etc.
Agreed. Nearly 100%. The only thing I’d say differently is that Springfield, MO is Not the South.
This forum has a strange obsession with members creating threads about what is and what isn’t the south. I don’t get it. But a simple thread search will yield a bounty of threads with similar content. They’re somewhat amusing, but weird at the same time lol.
Agreed.
And—that’s why I put Springfield-MO as Borderline South...or better, in “the Southern Marches.”
The significant Southern elements in some parts of Texas is one of the many things that make Texas what it is. But Texas is not a part of the American South. Texas is Texas.
New Orleans
Louisville
Tulsa
Oklahoma City
San Antonio
Springfield, MO
Tampa
Evansville
St. Louis
Cincinnati
Washington, DC
Baltimore
Morgantown
Miami
Wilmington, DE
El Paso
Pittsburgh
LEAST SOUTHERN
Only the top six really feel southern in the hardcore sense, with a special flavor for New Orleans. You really have to drive nearly an entire day before you start to get out of the "south" from NOLA (west TX, the Ohio River, central FL). Louisville may be right on the line, but KY as a state remains pretty hardcore southern, and Louisville hasn't really received many transplants like other border cities. Tulsa and OKC are also high due to OK retaining its Bible Belt culture pretty well, with only isolated progressive areas. Some other Lower Midwestern cities would certainly fall somewhere in this list if they were included. Dayton, OH would probably fall between DC and Baltimore in my "southern scale". Indianapolis would probably be around the Miami/Wilmington level. Wichita would be around the Tampa/Evansville range.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mighty Joe Young
Agreed. Nearly 100%. The only thing I’d say differently is that Springfield, MO is Not the South.
This forum has a strange obsession with members creating threads about what is and what isn’t the south. I don’t get it. But a simple thread search will yield a bounty of threads with similar content. They’re somewhat amusing, but weird at the same time lol.
Maybe that's because the South is the region that played the key role in our uniquely American racial drama. While the rest of the country was busy becoming the industrial behemoth Alexander Hamilton envisioned, it retained the plantation/farm/rural culture (made possible by slaves) Jefferson championed. (The West brought a different version of rural culture to the table, but by then, we'd already had the Civil War. Also, the South didn't get its Pittsburgh until about a decade or so after the war.)
And in many respects, the South, and the Deep South especially, remains the most culturally distinctive region of the country.
I will allow that Bible Belt culture, values and attitudes do track close to those we consider Southern, which is why the cities of the southern Central Plains states and the Ozarks get roped in with the South, as with the ones I boldfaced above. But I think that the Grain Belt is different enough from the South to make its cities something other than Southern, though the two in Oklahoma, and Tulsa especially, do also share the Jim Crow legacy that colors the South. (BTW, this coming year marks the centennial of the worst race massacre in American history, which took place in Tulsa. That event got buried by both perpetrators and victims up until relatively recently.)
But the Jim Crow legacy also colors my native Missouri, in diluted form (Blacks were never disenfranchised there once they got the vote, for instance). That's why all three of its major metropolitan areas have at one time or another gotten lumped in with the South. As home to one of the major fundamentalist Protestant denominational, the Assemblies of God, and as it's located in the Ozarks (it's the largest city in that region), I'd say Springfield is borderline Southern, much the way Louisville is. Neither of the two big cities past which the Missouri River flows (I think I read once that the currents don't really merge until south of St. Louis) are more than vestigially Southern: I'd put St. Louis and Baltimore in the same basket (Northern industrial cities in states where Jim Crow took roost), and Kansas City is really Western.
Wichita ditto, by the way: no city in Kansas can be said to be Southern at all, given all the blood that got spilled over whether that state would enter the Union as slave or free. ("Bleeding Kansas" bled all over the region just to Kansas City's west.)
This issue comes up a lot on c vs. c but there is almost no difference in lifestyle between much of NoVa and New Jersey or metroWest Boston suburbs. You're far more likely to here a Central American accent than a Southern one. Yes, there is a connection to Southern history there, but no one walks around Reston Town Center or Clarendon calling people "Yankees".
Basically all of northern VA aside from old town Alexandria could just as easily be mistaken for somewhere like Atlanta or Charlotte as well.
If Springfield is I'd say that Tulsa and OKC both are as well. From any perspective you want to chose.
Historically, What is unique about both Tulsa and OKC is that much of their working class roots are southern while their old time aristocracy generally was not.
OKC is particularly fascinating in that when it was settled by land run the river that runs through the middle of town(North Canadian) literally formed a barrier between the southern settlers who came up from the southern boundaries and the northern settlers who came down from the northern boundaries of the land run.
Miami might not only be the least Southern, but also the least American (as in the United States).
No way is Miami less Southern than Pittsburgh or Wilmington.
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