Texas used to be more southern than it is now. Back in 1860, Texas was still a relatively unsettled land and many of its “American” inhabitants were settlers or the children of settlers from other southern states. Texas didn’t really develop its own unique culture until after the civil war when cattle replaced agriculture as a dominant industry and tied Texas more to the growing west rather than the post-war south.
Bottom half of Indiana and Ohio are southern. Miami and the Keys are not.
I was born and grew up in northern Virginia, and I’m afraid that I must take issue with the “NoVa isn’t really the South” meme. It’s based on an archaic and stereotypical notion of what “the South” is supposed to be like, and if we were to block out all of the bits of the South that fail to conform to popular stereotypes, the entire region would look like Swiss cheese.
I think of the South as those geographic areas with cultural threads tracing back to the Jamestown colony. I think that takes in all of the states on the map in the OP.
(Not that there aren’t other cultural contributors, but the Jamestown culture is the common thread binding these states, I think.)
Honorary coonass here.I was told a "Yankee" is anyone nawth o' Mameaux.Not that simple, I’d wager.
I currently live in rural southeastern Ohio and this is as Yankee an area as the world ever produced. Even the houses look New England. And the second largest historic pride is the participation in the Underground Railroad locally.
Actually, as a Floridian, I’d alter that to rural Florida, totally Southern. Urban Florida, totally not.
St. Augustine, FLORIDA is the oldest continuously occupied city in the United States. I don’t know that you can trace much of Floridian culture back to Jamestown.
The truth is “Southern” is more a state of mind than actual geography.
Missourians might consider the Ozarks southern, but not St. Louis or Kansas City. In Kentucky, where I lived for several years, most of it is southern, but northern Kentucky (around Cinncinatti) really isn’t. OTOH, a lot of southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois are definitely southern in character.
The southern half of Delaware could be considered “southern” but there are so few people there compared to the northern half that it doesn’t much matter.
Eastern Texas is part of the South, but the rest of the state definitely isn’t.
The best derfinition of “southern” I’ve heard is “you can still get grits for breakfast there.”
That, and the default tea is sweet, if you want unsweet you have to specify that. Not the other way around.
I was born and raised in Oklahoma, and I consider myself a southerner. When I moved to Tennessee for a few months, nobody thought I had an accent. But when I visited Chicago, many people commented on my “southern accent.” Mostly, we Oklahomans talk southern and we cook southern. I think that ways of talkin’ and cookin’ are good guidelines for determining where “the South” is.
I was going to suggest that the tea was fresh, but your tea yardstick is more accurate. I love it here, but it’s the first thing I cautioned Mrs. Plant about. That stuff will send the unsuspecting into a diabetic coma.
Exactly! 
But seriously, come on: You know southern culture as expressed in Florida does not derive from the Spanish fort at St. Augustine. It derives from settlers coming into Florida from states to the north, Georgia in particular.
If you were to create an animation of migration patterns, you would see a flood flowing south and west from the Virginia colony into the other southern states, merging into (and swamping, really) later entry points in South Carolina, Georgia and other states. Then the Ulster Scot migration flows into and blends with the Virginia flood in numbers large enough to influence but not overwhelm it. The two floods combined eventually fill in the states shown in the OP’s map as “Southern.”
(The Virginia culture of which I’m thinking is not restricted to English settlers, by the way, but draws influence from Africans and Indians as well.)
Oh, and I also subscribe to the “grits test.”
I think that it used to be an easy question, but it is now much more difficult.
I have roots dating back to Jamestown, and family… Well, if there is a god, s/he pretty much tossed my family all over the place like he was shooting craps. I do have a bunch of family in Tennessee and that state is a mess. It is like three different planets. You’ve got Chattanooga in the east, Nashville in the middle, and Memphis in the west. I don’t know how you could find three different cities.
The easy distinctions are gone. It is now a muddled mess with pockets of interesting culture where you find it. You’re on your own as to what you are looking for.
I definitely consider Virginia (excepting DC Metro) and (most of) Kentucky Southern.
I would consider West Virginia “Appalachian” in that the culture of the Appalachians was historically isolated from mainstream Southern culture. WV and the mountainous eastern regions of Kentucky and Tennessee (and western North Carolina, on up the Appalachian chain) have historically had more in common with each other than any of them has had with the agricultural areas of the Deep South.
As for Florida, I created a handy map to this schizophrenic nuthouse for a previous thread.
Where’s Ft. Lauderdamndale and Travis McGee’s Busted Flush?
Mason Dixon line?
Bah, the REAL South starts at the Tropic of Cancer!
We went through this same thing a few months ago.
The urban parts of Maryland (Annapolis, Baltimore and DC) aren’t southern, but the rural parts have a definite southern flavor. The eastern shore, parts of western Maryland, rural Baltimore County, Harford County and Cecil County all have a very ‘southern’ feel.
born in N. Va. in 1952.
Not southern. Older folks as I was growing up remembered back when it was southern, but by the 60’s it was no longer so.