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Heres what i would consider the south, i left out Texas because i kind of consider them their own thing (aka Texas is Texas), even though parts of East Texas ,and even Houston are similar to the south. Also, No Oklahoma is not part the south they may have a similar accent but no, just no, **This is just a "ROUGH" outline**
Surprised you didn't include any of Texas but included all of Florida.
Heres what i would consider the south, i left out Texas because i kind of consider them their own thing (aka Texas is Texas), even though parts of East Texas ,and even Houston are similar to the south. Also, No Oklahoma is not part the south they may have a similar accent but no, just no, **This is just a "ROUGH" outline**
That's a pretty good demarcation line for 'The South' which is a collection of many different little 'Souths' if you explore it much. Look at New Orleans vs. Atlanta vs. Roanoke vs. Savannah vs. Nashville vs. Memphis. I would add a buffer transition zone of about 100-150 miles. more or less outside of your line. There are southern enclaves outside of that line but not many northern enclaves inside of it.
Sometimes it is hard to distinguish what is southern America and what is rural America. That might be part of the issue with parts of Oklahoma and Texas where western rural culture starts to kick in.
GS, hi.. I agree Western Maryland is Appalachian. But (your opinion) how is Maryland's Appalachian culture different/excised from the Southern subculture of Southwest VA/Western NC etc (?)
It is not very southern at all, shares many cultural similarities with the nearby Laurel Highlands region of PA. Garrett County in western MD also averages over 70 inches of snowfall per season, decidedly not southern in that regard.
Location: Appalachian New York, Formerly Louisiana
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Originally Posted by GraniteStater
It is not very southern at all, shares many cultural similarities with the nearby Laurel Highlands region of PA. Garrett County in western MD also averages over 70 inches of snowfall per season, decidedly not southern in that regard.
Having been to and knowing people from western Maryland personally, I can also say it's fairly similar to quite a bit of western NY. Especially areas in and around Allegany county (NY).
It is not very southern at all, shares many cultural similarities with the nearby Laurel Highlands region of PA. Garrett County in western MD also averages over 70 inches of snowfall per season, decidedly not southern in that regard.
If snowfall is not Southern, I guess the Appalachian high country from north Georgia on up isn't the South.
Seriously, I'd say sweet tea is a better indicator than most anything.
Delaware's two slave state senators were about balance. Slaves were about labor.
I wondered why Texas wasn't broken up into multiple states to gain more slave state senators. Probably not enough population to make it viable even up to the 1860s in the western and northern more rural parts.
The Mason-Dixon line is also out-dated garbage and was originally used to settle land disputes, not to define the border between the north and the south. Technically, the line that was established to do that excludes even Kentucky and Virginia from the geographically southern USA.
It is an extremely weak argument and even the government has considered officially defining Maryland as Northeastern multiple times.
I am sick of the Mason-Dixon line argument and I will not ever agree with it in context of our modern nation.
An extended family member, b. 1954, grew up in Maryland. She remembers segregated lunch counters in Elkton, MD. This would have been in the late 1950s or maybe even later. I'm a few years older and grew up in SW Pennsylvania. That kind of crap was not happening there. It certainly says a lot about Maryland, that this happened within the lifetime of someone who isn't retirement age yet.
I also read a book about the role of women in WW II. It talked about the "Jane Crow" laws in the factories in Baltimore. Granted, a long time ago, but still within living memory of some.
Last edited by Katarina Witt; 02-24-2018 at 10:40 PM..
Thanks for clueing me in to this discussion, Katarina Witt.
This much is clear: the state boundaries between regions don't match the cultural ones.
As I was skimming this thread and thinking of some comments about what's "Southern" and what isn't, I recall driving across New Jersey's southernmost reaches along US 40, which makes a bee line due west from Atlantic City once it splits off from US 322.
Somewhere in Salem County, it passes through a very small hamlet whose name I forget and makes a right turn to head northwest to meet the New Jersey Turnpike at the Delaware Memorial Bridge.
Said hamlet consisted of a two-story brick building with a weathered storefront, a couple of wood-framed houses and an old 1920s gas station, the kind that looks like an oversized wood-framed house whose "front porch" covers the gas pumps. (Needless to say, it wasn't serving its original purpose anymore.)
I could have sworn someone tore this place out of Mississippi and plunked it in New Jersey.
But if you were to extend the Pennsylvania-Maryland border eastward across the Delaware, this community would have been below it.
But as far as I can tell, no one in New Jersey, not even in Cape May, speaks with an accent I'd call even vaguely Southern. The Delaware Bay is an absolute barrier here.
You will find Southern accents spoken in parts of Maryland, mostly on the Eastern Shore and below St. Mary's City, but the most pronounced Southern accent I ever heard issue from a Marylander came from a woman who called the office where I worked at the time and said she was from "MARR-lin. Westminster Marr-lin." IIRC, that's in Baltimore County.
Meanwhile, as some have noted, the cultural line between North and South on the East Coast seems to lie along a line that passes through Fredericksburg, Va. Above it, you're within Washington's orbit, and while one wag once said of that city that it "combined Southern efficiency with Northern charm," it seems to me that whatever traces of Southernness the Greater Washington area may have once had have long since disappeared.
One thing Maryland and my native Missouri share is that those two states were deeply divided by the Civil War. Maryland's state flag looks like it does because during the war, Confederate sympathizers took to displaying the Crossland family arms instead of those of the Calverts, who founded the state (the two families are related via the first Lord Baltimore's mother, who was a Crossland). The flag bearing the arms of both families began to appear after the war as a symbol of reconciliation, and the state made it official in 1904.
Missouri was likewise split: one county, Callaway in the east-central part of the state (just below I-70, to boot), actually did secede from the state and the Union during a period when it had two rival state governments - one pro-Union, the other pro-Confederate.
Meanwhile, as some have noted, the cultural line between North and South on the East Coast seems to lie along a line that passes through Fredericksburg, Va. Above it, you're within Washington's orbit...
People say this, but without explanation, and I'd be really interested in hearing why. What does Washington's orbit mean to you, and how does it effect Fredericksburg and points northward greater than, say, points south?
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