Dixie Risen? A Look Back at the South in the Modern American Mind

1. Dixie Risen? A Look Back at the South in the Modern American Mind

2. Moving from North Carolina to Kansas revealed my unexplored Southerness • This was not good. Midwesterners had negative feelings about the South, but they liked to hear me say “y’all” • LSU seemed to be the place to explore this, way behind the Magnolia Curtain • Pete Shortridge had conducted a national survey about the Mid-West, I aped that survey with one about the Deep South at LSU • Peter Applebome’s 1996 book, Dixie Rising…spurred the survey and subsequent number crunching at UNCW

4. A nation-wide captive audience of freshmen Geography students were shamelessly used • John Shelton Reed, Professor of Sociology at UNC, inveterate South watcher, egged me on • Fred Kniffen, Cultural Geography at LSU, ditto • Colleagues, friends or professors who had never heard of me in 37 states, graciously took class time from their students to answer the survey questions and draw the Deep South on a map

7. Aided and abetted by Harry Smith, UNCW Mathematics, who wrote code so I could analyze the graphic part of the survey, I scanned a sample of the thousands received

9. The idea was to make sample composites of the perceived location of the Deep South from other regions • The intriguing thing about Pete’s work was that the Midwest moved, depending on who drew it. • The location of the Deep South was not as hard to pin down as the Midwest had been for Pete, although some students included Southern California and Arizona!

10. Two of Pete’s maps

11. Nearly universal confusion reigned between the South and the Deep South • The South is Dixie • The Deep South IS the domain of kudzu, cotton, Bubbas, Baptists, and bugs, and is a sub-region of Dixie • The survey respondents perceived the South and the Deep South (basically undifferentiated) as the domain of racists, heat and humidity, obesity, incest, willful ignorance, the radical right, and bugs

13. South Deep South

14. Dixie, Wiki

20. Not the best idea I ever had • My image of the South had been mostly positive before moving to Kansas • (Glib photo montage)

21. Friendliness

23. Fashion

25. Food

28. World’s largest frying pan, Burgaw, NC

29. Fishing

30. Agriculture

31. Religion

33. Lost Cause

35. Music

36. Wilber Zelinsky, John Shelton Reed, and other South watchers had explored the South using digital phone books. • I aped that too

40. There’s a lot of Dixie and a lot of Bubba in Texas, but it’s not the Deep South

41. The responses were put into categories: Nationally, the survey showed…

43. Alarmingly, many of the respondents listed negative characteristics • The number one Deep Southern negative characteristic was racism

44. 1940s, Tarboro, NC

45. 1950s

46. 1990s, Knoxville, TN

47. 1991, Charleston, SC

48. 1993, Greensboro, NC

49. 1993, Wilmington, NC

50. 1993, Wilmington, NC