A sweet gal who was leading a tour of Mercer House in Savannah, GA, that I took recently, referred to the interruption of the building of the house as “the late unpleasantness.”
I’ve heard that phrase was used after the war. I didn’t realize it still applied 140 years later.
I love it! Will they acept that it took me 50+ years?
Perhaps she was being funny.
You need to see the basement of the Alamo.
Funny thing about that War Between the States. Seems like some people, from both areas, are still fighting it. Sad.
In my family tree, the US Civil War is a non event. During (and shortly after) that time period, my Father’s family had yet to leave Prussia for Texas, and my Mother’s was busy trying to preserve what was left of their vanishing culture and dealing with being forced into Oklahoma.
I recently researched my family genealogy and was surprised to realize how many Confederate (i.e. active duty) ancestors and how many slaveowning ancestors I had. The family stories about either are very few, though a few stories about Reconstruction survived the war (mainly the class shake up- seeing people who were rich before the war now wearing rags and selling homemade jelly on the streets or the obnoxious Union soldiers occupying the towns who made trouble for people trying to sell wears or attractive girls).
I am not at all embarassed to be Southern. While we’ve certainly had our “less than admirable” moments, we don’t deny them, and the South has changed A LOT just in my lifetime. Cable/Internet/Mass Media of all kinds and air conditioning and chain stores have completely rewritten the South in the past few decades and many people I’ve known who move here from the North or Midwest or West Coast are almost disappointed at how similar it is to there. Climate and racial makeup are about the only two major holdouts that aren’t likely to change as the people become a tad more liberal (to watch the news you’d think that all Southerners were gun totin’ Bushite Bible Beaters and that is FAR from true- those people are not a majority, though they are a uniform voting plurality that gets courted because added to the other more moderate voters a candidate gets they can swing an election) and the shopping mall culture takes over. People are surprised to learn that cities of 50,000 in Alabama have Goth kids, openly gay couples, pot heads (actually marijuana has always been huge down here, in some places a far bigger 20th/21st century cash crop than cotton or peaches or corn), *Desperate Housewives *groupies, etc… I went to high school in the early 1980s at a place so rural it was surrounded on all sides by cattle pastures and the whole Valley Girl “gag me with a spoon”/“grodie to the max” speak was in vogue as was the Flashdance ripped sweatshirt and jeans look.
The accent has softened in my lifetime also. Of course Scandinavian exchange students at my high school were surprised by me because they said “Your classmates… they talk like… eh… Dukes of Hazzard… Dallas… you are more… Nightly News or Today Show” as I don’t have much of an accent (for no real reason- I was reared by three generations of Southerners who did). In some schools kids are now actually made fun of if they have a strong Southern accent. Sad in a way (well, depending on the accent- some of them are annoying and need to die).
My teenaged niece and nephew have grown up in a city of 10,000 to privileged parents; my niece is currently at Harvard and received a SUV on her 16th birthday, her brother would curl into a fetal position and die if you took away his X-Box and Blackberry, both read NYT Bestseller List titles, their accents are very soft. I wonder sometimes just how Southern they are- they attend a Protestant church and deal with the heat (albeit in a large air conditioned house with a swimming pool) but not only have they never known racial segregation, their parents have never known it- it’s something from their grandparents generation and before. When I was a kid I knew people who remembered the Civil War veterans, I was babysat by a woman whose parents and oldest siblings were born slaves (she herself was born ca. 1880 and was ancient but still going strong at 90) and knew the members of the family whose hands were calloused from chopping cotton, all of them long dead now; my nephew and niece have no real concept of how close they are to the cotton fields and the tin roofed dogtrots that my father grew up in and take their notion of the Southern past from Hollywood and pulp fiction. It’s very strange.
Ultimately the thing that makes us Southern will I suppose be memory, and those second person.
I used to work in Milledgeville, Georgia at a library that housed the papers and the personal library and many effects of the author Flannery O’Connor. I lived in an apartment complex a half mile from the entrance to her family home Andalusia. Flannery wrote a lot about the homogenization of the American South by commerce and chain malls that was happening even by the time of her death in 1964. One day I was standing on the front porch of Andalusia with some friends from the university and its current director and we had to shout to be heard because of the sounds of construction coming from over the tree line that separated us from the former pasture 1000 feet away where the new WalMart Super Center was being constructed. It was a surreal moment.
Wow.
Are the descendents of her peafowl around?
My Grandmother visited with Confederate soldiers at the Old Soldiers Home, now part of the campus of the Arkansas School for the Blind.
I think most of us sound like Johnny Carson now. 
My cousin from New York visited us. At a restaurant she and I went to the bar for a smoke. She was so surprised that we all wore shoes and that I had a job working on computers she asked, “This is the South isn’t it?”
I kept a straight face and replied, “Well, we lost the war.”
She nodded sagely.
I had a customer comment with PLEASURE that I used the phrase “fixin’ to” she was from elsewhere southern and declared she hadn’t heard it since she moved here.
I asked her if she knew the difference between southern girls and northern girls, she said she didn’t. Northern girls say “Yes, you can.” Southern girls say “yes, ya’ll can.”
We are a friendly bunch.
Has no one thought of the Fried Green Tomatoes?
(OT) My Great-Grandmother was a Kaw Indian (known as a rather nasty bunch of folks) and I have an ancestor named Lake Erie. She attended the Oklahoma school of the blind, I have a picture of her with a “warrior princess” and her teachers. (/OT)
We are also known for our colorful names, I have great aunts and uncles named North Carolina (Nola), Washington, Idaho (Ida), Oregon (Ora) and a few other states I can’t recall. My Mother and her two sisters are named Davy, Jean and Kim. They all got drafted until things got proven.
Here’s the best division of North America that I know of into its true regions. The South is called Dixie in Garreau’s theories:
Note that the South/Dixie doesn’t follow state boundaries very well at all in Garreau’s dividing of the continent.
Howdy
Let’s see… my mom is in Virginia visiting her folks right now. My grandfather (dad’s side) ancestors came to N.Carolina from Ireland, g.mothers from Scotland to S.Carolina. Dad’s bunch settled in Georgia right after the revolution. Grandma’s folks wound up in Alabama before coming to Texas. We all got here prior to the Civil War. I’d say we got the South pretty much covered. Oh, I forgot a bunch of coonass cousins in and around New Orleans. I got folks in Oklahoma and Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky too. Heck, maybe that’s one thing about Southerners most of us have in common, big families. A sense of history too. I can actually trace my ancestors on all sides back several hundred years and know some personal stories about many of them.
We all got a gift for gab and love of family. We like sweet tea, grits and gravy… pecan pie, live music, BBQ, good manners, fast horses, dancing, fishing, shade trees, and a good dog.
We appreciate honesty and also like a good yarn. As long as we can tell the difference. A tall tale doesn’t necessarily make you a liar. 
There’s so much I could just go on for days. But y’all wouldn’t appreciate me taking up all of your time. So, I’ll just go over yonder and set a spell.
*Yonder, a word with no precise definition. It can mean near or far, but a simple nod or glance is all that is needed when used in conversation.
~Sincerely yours, JB
Nope. Her mother got rid of them shortly after she died (her mother lived to be ancient; she’s only been dead about 10 years). There’s talk of importing some for the atmosphere now that the (depressing) place is open to the public.