Census South is a culture region slavery’s economy remade
The Southern United States—Dixie, the Southland—is one of four U.S. Census Bureau regions between the Atlantic and the West, touching Midwest and Northeast. Scholars often redraw it off neat state lines; California’s latitude does not make it culturally Southern.
The Census Bureau counts sixteen states plus the District of Columbia as Southern, split into South Atlantic, East South Central and West South Central divisions. In 2010 about 114.6 million people, 37 percent of Americans, lived there, making it the most populous region, and in this century it is also the fastest-growing, with Houston its largest city. Historically its northern edge followed the 36°30′ parallel, the Ohio River and the old Mason–Dixon survey, but Maryland, Delaware, Washington and northern Virginia now lean toward the Northeast in many ways. A 2010 survey of social geographers picked thirteen states as the cultural South.
Most of the region has a humid subtropical climate with growing seasons of at least six months before frost. Its landscapes range from bayous and pine forests to Appalachian montane woods and Gulf coast maritime forest, home to alligators, cottonmouths, armadillos, black bears and roseate spoonbills. It holds almost all of the Bible Belt, where evangelical churches such as the Southern Baptist Convention draw high attendance.
People arrived by about 9500 BC. From around 800 to 1500 AD the Mississippian culture built mounds and trade routes stretching from the East Coast to the Great Lakes; Narváez in 1528 and de Soto in 1540 saw it in decline. Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole peoples descended from those mound builders still live in the region, though European disease, war and forced removal devastated Native populations.
After the Civil War and Reconstruction came thousands of lynchings, Jim Crow segregation and poll taxes that kept most Black and many poor white citizens from voting until the 1960s. The resulting Solid South voted almost uniformly Democratic from 1877 to 1964, and scholars describe parts of the region as authoritarian enclaves until the Civil Rights Act.
Source: Southern United States
