And don’t forget the fun fact that the Southhas higher syphillis rates than the North.
I am not sure what you mean about that. As a small Southern boy, we were taught all about Southern history going back 400 years from day one. This was in a very poor, rural area and we all loved it. It does extend to the Civil War and almost every history class in our public schools spent significant time on the Civil War for better or for worse. Even the poorest students and hardscrabble families knew a lot of history. Southerners excel at storytelling, especially the historical kind and it helped us maintain historical traditions over many decades with some corruption of course. History is also taught through politics for better or for worse,
I am sure the Polish people in Chicago, for example, do the exact same thing but the South is just many times bigger. Being Southern isn’t explicitly about ethnicity either. It requires an upbringing in the South and then a particular mindset. I have seen people like gay a 100% Korean person among others that were, accepted fully as Southern and many other types as well.
Southern people don’t just declare allegiance to Southern-Hood. They are also fiercely allegiance to the United States in general and also to their home state.
After 13 years away, I still self-identify strongly as Southern and that is what I will say if someone asks in a non-specific way.
I am very proud of it because that greatly shaped who I am. I have never understood the argument that you can’t be truly proud of something that you didn’t great. I would expect a Cherokee Indian to be proud of his tribal traditions. Likewise, I have the last name of my xxx-grandparents that landed at Jamestown right at 400 years ago. Who wouldn’t be proud of that? It stated the culture that ultimately helped me be who I am.
Since the last five presidents came from Texas, Arkansas, Maine and Texas, California, and Georgia, I think we can put that whole nobody-respects-us-poor-Southerners thing to rest now.
Louisiana has the world class city of New Orleans. I am not sure if you been there but jazz was born there and it also has world class cuisine with the appropriate restaurants to serve it up and turn it out in both the most casual and highest end luxury that you can ever find. It also hosts Mardi Gras which is the biggest 2+ week party in the U.S. Combine that with Creole history spanning multiple continents and Cajun history that spawned a classical poem called Evangeline. Louisiana hsitory by itself is too broad to allow just one in depth college course.
Mississippi has been a beacon to the world in projecting both pivotal music in both the blues, rock and roll and literature that is both luminating and started revolutions.
Boyo Jim - Your post is extremely offensive, incredibly ignorant, and just plain disruptive once again. How could you introduce these three things into an educated message board - "KKK to Jim Crow to George Wallace to David Duke…"Why do you think those have any bearing on what people are talking about anywhere on this board and especially this thread?
David Duke lost his last race back when I was in college in 1992. The KKK has its biggest presence in Indiana and Connecticut the last time I checked. Their numbers are tiny anyway. Then, you go for the field go punt from 90 yards- George Wallace. I know who he is but I have no idea whatsoever what you are trying to prove by citing a tenuous figure born at the end of WWI.
Your ignorance is shining through like a black hole once again. Do you have anything intelligent to say about the South like maybe its history and how it really relates to today.
Me?
Shagnasty’s xxx-grandparents and my xxx-grandparents might have been on the same boat, so watch it! 
Besides, y’all don’t eat grits, and that makes you suspect right there.
I do not laugh out loud much.
“The Kentucky State Capitol” did the trick.
That is so bad… 
Er, I was under the impression that many of Lincoln’s initial generals were basically timid and unwilling to be ruthless, as opposed to Lee and company, so for a while they gave at least as good as they got, if not better.
However, I have not studied the CW in any detail, so I could well be wrong.
I think it has something to do with the fact that being Southern is marked, in the anthropological sense: in the same way that we think of a watered-down Midwestern accent as being unaccented English, we think of a sort of watered-down version of the Midwestern experience as being “typical” American: “Anytown, USA” is Midwestern. If you grow up in the South, any story, in the news, in a movie or TV show, in a book is defaulted to the Midwestern experience: a world of snowtires and basements and subways and taxis and iceskating and Catholic schools and pizza and living in apartments until old age. We see the “real” America in this sort of shared fantasy default. We know our own world is different: it’s a world of biscuits and gravy and of double-wides and wearing shorts on Christmas and kudzu and owning your own rifle and Holy Rollers and carports. If ever we see that world on TV, in a movie, in a book, it’s presented as different than the norm, as an unusual setting, as something that has to be explained to the audience.
I think that really encourages a sense of identity to develop. If a charecter in a movie or book is Southern, he/she is Southern for a reason. You grow up with that, it stands to reason you’d get used to thinking that being from the South means something, marks you.
My peasant whatever grandparents would have been sitting in Bavaria doing who-knows-what. Probably attempting not to get trampled by someone.
Does the fact that my ancestors came to this country in the 1800s instead of the 1600s reveal something about me? If so, what?
That it’s a Southern thing, and you wouldn’t understand? 
Actually, my father’s side of the family spent that time toiling away either in Alsace or the Ukraine…peasants all. They didn’t get over here until the 1890s. But mom’s side has been here since Jamestown, and that feeling of place is something that you are raised in. It’s any number of things: ancestry, history, food, location…any and all and none of the above. Read Albion’s Seed for a hint of the depth of culture the South possesses. Or maybe this book would be better.
A lot of that is just as exotic to me as to any southerner. As a child of hillbillies, I’d say that “my people” are probably less seen on TV or in books and movies than southerners, and when we are, it’s to show someone who is maybe incestuous or can play the banjo or who is involved in a long, drawn-out family feud of some sort.
As usual, Manda JO has nailed it. If your group/area/skin color is always presented as “the others” in the common culture, you can react in two ways: You can accept that there’s something “not normal” about you, or you can try to counter it by affirming that you are, in fact, just as worthy of respect as the mainstream.
I’ve noticed for a long time that the only groups that it’s still acceptable to make fun of on national TV are Southerners and cross-dressers. It doesn’t bother me that Cleetus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is Southern, but it bothers me (a little bit) that, almost without exception, all Southern TV characters are presented as stupid, ignorant, cruel, poverty-stricken racists. The implicit message: All Southerners are like that.
Then again, if the bad reputation keeps us from being overrun by carpetbaggers looking to make the South just like everywhere else, maybe it’s worth it.
Politics, arts, letters - I’m tempted to brush broad and declare that if it weren’t for the South and for New York, we wouldn’t have nearly so rich or colorful a heritage for any of these things in America. I know that if they’d been left to the people of my ancestral Upper Midwest, they’d have been much drabber, more private, self-conscious undertakings.
Considering the tone of some of the replies in this thread, there are still a few people around who don’t respect Southerners.
I don’t think we watch the same shows.
A few of the Southerner replies have had the same tone.
shrug You’re probably right. I don’t watch much TV these days aside from The Simpsons, football, NASCAR, and America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Oh crap, I just proved the South-bashers’ point, didn’t I?
You didn’t prove the bashers’ point, but you’ve demolished your own. NASCAR, Coca-Cola, country music, politics, CNN, college sports; you are not the outsiders anymore. I don’t question Southern pride, but it’s hard to listen to Southern victimhood while you’re taking over the country.
Meanwhile, the North desperately needs their own version of Charlie Daniels.*
Get loud, get loud and proud now;
You can be proud now;
Be glad you’re a Yankee;
'Cause the North’s gonna do it again!
*Obviously, I’m kidding; a Northern Man don’t need Charlie Daniels around anyhow.
I can’t let this pass.
Do you really believe that is the reason people are flocking to the south?
Everything I have seen and read points to the migration to the south to be primarily much cheaper housing and land.
The second most common thing I have seen, was people wanting to escape the snow.
The South having a lot to offer and their traditions has never even registered as a reason before reading your post.
Now New Orleans and Austin I would buy for the culture and Atlanta for the good jobs. But most of the move to the South, would seem to be about economics and retirement.
Jim