I’m not sure I should. I don’t understand your analogy.
‘West Virginia is the Newfoundland of America’ would seem to be a characterization ripe for argument from both West Virginians and Newfoundlanders - but maybe not.
They’re more like the Transcaucusus republics–at the periphery of three distinct regions, but not claimed by any of them.
As an Upstate New Yorker turned Tarheel, and without meaning it insultingly, Virginia as a state has an arrogance, a conceitedness about it. Most of the rest of the South considers themselves as “good ol’ boys that produce the occasional outstanding figure, someone their hometown can be proud of,” with an overlay of decaying antebellum genteelity peeling off the walls. But Virginia is the self-styled aristocracy of the South, the “Old Dominion,” birthplace of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lee… They do have a lot to be proud of, to be sure, but, oh my, are they proud of it! That is not intended as a slam on the state or its inhabitants, simply an observation on an attitude that seems quite prevalent among much of Virginia’s populace.
In understanding the state, it’s probably important to remember that charter-wise it was the first English colony in America. (Yeah, the Lost Colony at Roanoke preceded it, and Plimoth Plantation comes close to tying Jamestown/Williamsburg in age. But the point is that from the perspective of contermporary English thought, they were both in Virginia – “Massachusetts Bay, in the northern regions of Virginia” and similar descriptives.
The present state originally included the land between the 36th parallel and the Potomac River, and thence northwest from its headwaters at a 45-degree angle that would include Omaha, Calgary, and Anchorage within Virginia if they’d kept it. After the Revolution, the Ohio River became the northwest boundary, with the Potomac and then the south line of Pennsylvania being the line east of that. Shortly thereafter, the land west of the Alleghenies was set off as Kentucky Territory. But it still remained a BIG state. In 1860, taking the road west from Pittsburgh would put you in Virginia.
During the early days of the Civil War, the northwestern portions of the state, in the mountains west of the Great Valley and along the Ohio, remained loyal to the Union. The last session of the Virginia legislature before Reconstruction was held in Wheeling, expelled those members in rebellion against the U.S., and petitioned Congress to partition the state, resulting in West Virginia.
So what remains is:
- The Tidewater conurbation around Hampton Roads, including Williamsburg, Newport News, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and all their neighbor communities.
- The core of the state, around Richmond and Petersburg. Surrounding this is rolling country to the west and relatively sparsely populated coastal areas deeply indented by arms of the Chesapeake to the east and north.
- The southern half of the Baltimore-Washington conurbation, with no really large central cities (Washington, just across the river, is that) but with a complex grid of cities and counties largely developed. Very high average income, fairly liberal, pretty much unlike any of the rest of the state.
- The Great Valley, the graben between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mtns., including the Shenandoah, New, Roanoke, and Holston River Valleys. Beautiful country, and perhaps the north end of the “real South.”
- A strip of land southwest of all the above running along the North Carolina and Tennessee borders that is relatively poor, rural-South, and “redneck” in character.
(All the above are generalizations containing some truth but not intended to stereotype everyone. My mother-in-law was from Gate City, in #5 above, for example, and a unique individual with some but by no means all the traits described. Lynchburg, on the western edge of region #4, boasts Jerry Falwell’s complex, but also a strong progressive tradition in its newspaper and many of its politicians. I’ve known, separately, two people from Wytheville, and neither matches any stereotype.)
The point to all this is: “Virginia” is what was left after pieces got peeled off to make other states. It’s a sprawling, complex area that defies simple description, as a result. Interstate 81 runs over 300 miles within the state, and no point on it is closer than 180 miles to Norfolk. It’s big, it’s a wide mix of cultures, and there is no simple 25-words-or-less descriptor that fits.
I guess so, but it’s the “Virginia is the Quebec of the US” that I don’t understand. You talk of the Civil War, but Canada has never had this kind of civil war.
A good rule of thumb when thinking about the South is that the further north and/or the more mountainous the area, the smaller the black population. This is because the shorter growing season/lack of arable land made it far harder for people to grow enough crops to save enough money to buy slaves. So you didn’t have a significant black population in most of the Appalachians, even in southernmost parts of the chain, at the end of the Civil War and didn’t really have anything to draw a black migration afterward.
Canada had a standard-type war, Quebec lost. Quebec remains a french speaking province that continually threatens to secede. Their license plates say ‘I remember’ and the flag they fly currently is based on the fleur-de-lys. In these ways they parallel some of the views of the American south, but it is, if anything, more prominent than Southern nostalgia for the CSA.
I’m Chicago-born, but have lived in Northern Virginia for going on 18 years. I love it, absolutely love it.
Low taxes, business friendly, great school systems, diverse population, beautiful country with mountains in the west, rolling hills in the middle, and the ocean to the east. I wasn’t a Civil War buff before I moved here; now I am. There’s more history here in an hour’s drive than in most any other place in America, always something to learn, see or do. The Revolution, the Founding, the Civil War… it’s all here.
Most of the characterizations above are good enough for golf. We have our disparities, and racial politics are still evolving here (less so than in some deeper South states-- but hey, Yankee Boston and Philly have their own share, too). Personally, I’m politically conservative, and would hate to have liberal Northern Virginia ruin the character of the rest of the state, but I’m also realistic in knowing that we’re the economic engine that fuels the rest of the economy here (much like growing up in Chicago, where anything south or west of the city was lumped in with the rest of “downstate” Illinois, a.k.a. hick farmers).
Virginia still has a very definite character, however, stronger than that in many U.S. states. The best analogy I can think of is “Eastern Texas”-- Texas being the proverbial “whole other country.”
Being raised primarily in Northern Virginia (and living there today), and having been to both Atlantic Canada and Quebec, I must say that Appalachia seems to be culturally akin to the Canadian Maritimes (lots of Scottish people, a significant folk music heritage, and plenty of poor farmers and miners).
I actually was thinking about a comparison with Quebec too, as Virginia has two urban areas (Arlington and Alexandria) across from DC and there has been a non-trivial amount of rivalry, but at the end of the day everyone seems to get along nowadays, though there once was cross-Potomac warfare of course.
(spelling corrected)
Friends don’t let friends live in Maryland. 
Born over the river in Maryland; raised in a few places nearby and in some other states, but settled in Virginia since about 1980.
Polycarp’s characterization of the state as tending toward arrogant is flippant, harsh, and right on the money. 
Derleth’s observation that reconstruction pissed off the South mightily is true, although I would argue the real source of that resentment actually occurred just before Reconstruction. Heh. However, Virginia high school education heavily emphasizes the Reconstruction period – we always had weeks and months of carpetbaggers and poll taxes, but almost nothing after the Great Depression. WWII, Vietnam, civil rights, and the rest may have happened to Virginians, but the school boards were fixated on an earlier time. We never got more than a week or two of history on those topics, taught right before summer break, with the windows open and the spring breeze coming in and the girls all wearing their most attention-getting outfits. The spring breeze is potent in Virginia, especially when you’re seventeen.
But the war which transferred Canada from France to Britain isn’t comparable to the American Civil War. It predates Canada as we know it today (and in a sense is largely responsible for what Canada is today) and it wasn’t the result of regional tensions. By this I mean, while the American Civil War was between the North and the South, the Seven Years War in North America can’t be said to have been between Quebec and “Canada” because at the time, Canada was Quebec.
As for the fleur-de-lys, almost nobody in Quebec sees that as a symbol of Ancien Régime France (even though it was): it’s seen as a Quebec national symbol. And as for Je me souviens, the motto of Quebec by Eugène-Étienne Taché, it appears to give English Canadians fits, but it’s really quite innocuous. Taché put it on the façade of the National Assembly building, between statues of a few important characters from our history, so it seems to refer to remembering our whole history. Here is an article about the motto.
So no, I won’t be pitting you, but the analogy still seems dubious to me.
I guess the flaw of any analogy is that it is inherently erroneous, and a comparison between apples and oranges. This analogy began its short and inglorious life as a thumbnail sketch for someone from one culture to get a gestalt about another culture. The only point of it was that a Canadian could easily get a flavour of the fracture lines from the American civil war by considering the stress lines in Canada. It is certainly the case that neither country has integrated the two sides, and arguably Canada less than the US - whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is another discussion entirely, hopefully not in the pit - if you decide to start it, please PM me. I should acknowledge that the CSA was fighting valiantly for a cause that was wrong, while France was fighting valiantly for a reasonable cause, so there is a pretty big difference there.
I certainly found the analogy useful - coming from the American South - when I moved to Canada. Many Anglophones have very little tolerance for issues regarding Quebec, and I found that by considering the history of the south I had more sympathy for Quebec’s positions. For example, the formation of the Bloc made a lot more sense to me than to my friends and relatives in Canada.
Had I realized that you were from Quebec, I would have made my argument differently. I thought you were an American, as most posters on the SDMB are, no disrespect was or is intended to you or to la belle province.
Northern Virginia has the best Korean food outside of Korea. Arlington has Vietnamese food that native Vietnamese travel across the US to buy. We got Thai, Salvadoran, and Peruvian restaurants coming up well, too, and although rare, our Sierra Leonean Resturants are fantastic. (A few are actually Ghanaian, but the cooking is heavily influenced.) Afghani restaurants too, although most of them are actually Pakistani. Hindu cooking is also growing in popularity.
My son was hoping the Uigars in Guantanamo would be granted asylum here. He says they open really good restaurants in China, but The Bahamas got them.
Tris