Yes, Ma’am, I understand that, but you never met my Mama.
Not to hijack the thread, but I just listened to the Civil War lectures of David Blight from Yale (they’re free on iTunes U). They were great until he became positively unhinged over Southerners denying that slavery was the one and only cause of the war and how that dastardly Andrew Johnson wanted to reunite the nation instead of hanging every last filthy treasonous Confederate. Turns out he wrote a whole book on the subject, one I don’t care to read.
And the First Arkansas Cavalry, CSA, fought the First Arkansas Cavalry, USA in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
And Maryland and Delaware were slave states.
But I digress. 
Well, here’s a popular company mining the “we’re not over it” vein-
http://dixieoutfitters.com/p/mission
One thing that nobody’s pointed out is that in the early-mid 1980’s, there was a HUGE wave of migration of upper Midwest rust-belters and New Yorkers/New Jerseyites to Texas, because at the time, the big economic downturn hadn’t hit Texas yet.
So combine huge numbers of (what seemed to us to be) rude, obnoxious Northerners showing up, combined with a economic crash that caught us later than the rest of the country, and there was indeed some animosity toward “Yankees” as I recall them being called.
I recall a childhood acquaintance was from Rochester, NY and relative to all the other born & bred Texans, he and his family seemed like they were from another planet in terms of social graces and things like that. His parents were widely considered rude, blunt and crass, and in retrospect, I don’t really think they were, but they were just typical upstate New Yorkers, and everyone else was more steeped in politeness than they were.
I think this probably explains the OP’s teacher’s experience in Texas.
That, or they were genuinely trying to be helpful, if he was complaining a lot. As in, if it bothers you so much that everything’s closed on Sunday and it’s hot and people like to chat before doing business and the food’s all different and there are people around that you disagree with politically and there are people who have guns and hunt and people ask you about church, then there are plenty of colleges up North where none of those things ever happen and you might really be happier attending one of those.
I want one of those. With the wording, include a 35-star flag (the number of stars on V-CSA Day) to underscore the point.
When it was actually about the free coining of silver…
To be fair, I was trying to make a point. Which I did.
And I do know a fair amount about the political situation surrounding the Civil War. I’m just not a military historian, whereas the people I was with could tell you every battle and who commanded both sides. I’m similarly ignorant of the nitty gritty of most wars including WWI and WWII; I’m more into social history than military history.
Someone on this board once wrote, “Many southerners think that they are prejudiced against Jews. Actually, it’s New York accents that they hate.”
Yeah, the notion that slavery was not at the heart of the civil war is one of the more sinister lies about history.
Northern girls say “You may.”
Southern girls say “Y’all may.”
Rudest people IMHO are French-Canadians.
Here in DC I’ve met a few northerners who were spoiling for a fight about the civil war. They apparently can’t be happy until every single person in the south apologizes to them personally for slavery. One guy I worked with wouldn’t even enter the south if he could avoid it. He seemed to really believe that shotgun wielding hicks would recognize him as being from Michigan, of all places, and drag him into the woods for a little Deliverance type action. He had set himself up to be insulted by any attitude from a southern person.
My rural relatives will mention “Yankees” from time to time in a derogatory way but I think they really mean people from large cities. For example, “Atlanta is full of Yankees.”
I’m interested in this product.
Friend’s father (southern born and raised, shine makin’, pig cookin’ good ol’ boy): Y’all know the difference 'tween a Yankee and a DAMN Yankee?
Me (Pennsy born and raised, what’s a pig pickin’?) : Um, no.
FF: A Yankee is a northerner who comes down for a visit. A DAMN Yankee stays!
I don’t travel a great amount but I’ve run into friendly people everywhere. I attribute rudeness to the individual, not the region. BTW, I found people in NYC to be very friendly and helpful to obvious tourists such as myself.
The only thing I noticed was subtle: kids who moved to my school from elsewhere in the Upper South or from deeper South would tend to fit in well enough to get fairly high up the clique ladder, but people from the north, despite being perfectly nice people, would never break in. But I guess that could just be how ingrained the different cultures were.
The one thing I noticed is that absolutely none of them were at all rude, which is why I have a hard time with people telling me that people up North just seem ruder than those down South. Then again, this is Arkansas, and the Northern half besides. It’s not anywhere near deep South.
I haven’t seen this, but awhile back there was an awful lot of the slogan “The South’s Gonna Do It [del]Again[/del] Agin”, leading me to wonder what “It” was (secession? slavery?) and whether “It” was such a good idea.
Never been to Maine, I see.
Plenty of spin on both sides, there. Of course secession was over slavery, and the folks at the time weren’t shy about admitting it. Recent historical evidence derived from letters written from soldiers to their families shows that the preservation of slavery was central to grunts’ efforts in the war. And although abolitionists existed in the South at the time, they were overwhelmingly black :).
And about who was going to get Titan IIs stuck in their back yard for the Russians to shoot at.
This thread was going so well…
“We Messed With Texas, And They Surrendered.”