Why were the people from the Southeast in the US so different from the rest of the US?
Upvote:10
This answer is for a previous version of the question
The most persuasive answer to this that I have read recently can be found in "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America" by Colin Woodard. It has been a few years since I read it, but if I remember correctly, he posits that different cultural patterns that were set in the first few generations of settlement got propagated and reinforced, so that even newcomers to specific areas acclimated themselves to the unique regional culture.
In the case of the South, it took two wrenching national interventions (the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement) to get their racial assumptions to move as far as they did. Other Southern characteristics that were not specifically targeted against have carried on unimpeded (honor culture, Protestant Christianity).
I do think that your question as currently worded carries some implied bias in that the North should not be portrayed as more "noble". There was plenty of racism throughout the North too, in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Abraham Lincoln had to walk a very fine line to not get ahead of northern pubic opinion about black people, and later, plenty of northern unions worked to keep blacks out of good positions.
Admittedly, this a hard subject to discuss without bias. I could relate anecdotes from work talking with people throughout the country, and I can certainly see a different style of work and set of values between a New Yorker, a Southerner, and a Upper Midwesterner. These general impressions are real but hard to quantify. What unit of measure does one use to say that a New Yorker values speed and competitiveness, Southerner values personal relationships, and a Midwesterner values honesty. How do you discuss the negative traits without being offensive? How to you calculate an average of a region given the person-by-person variation?
Hypotheses regarding climate causing different traits in the population have been around at least since Montesquieu, but they often run into a problem of proving causality instead of just correlation. Like any social science, you do not have the luxury of setting up experiments with proper controls solve questions about human behavior.
Regarding your supposition that certain types of people gravitated to "like-minded" areas, this does not seem to borne out by history. Most immigrants in the period 1820-1920 moved to the North and West because that was where labor was in demand and better remunerated, due to industrialization. The labor shortage was less in the South, enabling institutions like sharecropping. It is possible that the "Northern work ethic" could be related to the fact that getting better rewarded for work makes one work more, whereas poor rewards teach a more lackadaisical attitude.
Most of these observations cannot be "proven", but they do provide fodder for discussions of what America is and can be. They also show that there is not consensus on what America "should" be.
More post
- 📝 Native American Technology
- 📝 Did the US military just kill more Russians in Syria than they ever did during the Cold War?
- 📝 Why did USSR lay down undersea communications cable between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok?
- 📝 How to translate runic text not knowing the origin?
- 📝 Was it ever deemed illegal to translate the Qu'ran?
- 📝 Were Trojans the ancestors of the Romans?
- 📝 Help identify Venetian headpiece
- 📝 Why did wheat become the dominant food culture?
- 📝 What were the international space arrangements and scientific purposes Eisenhower spoke of in October 1957?
- 📝 How can I research multiple raids at the Somnath Temple?
- 📝 Where did the Roman money involved in the spice and luxury trade end up?
- 📝 How old is the practice of removing wisdom teeth?
- 📝 What were the requirements for Iron Cross first and second class?
- 📝 Did the Germans have a team equivalent to the one from Bletchey Park in the UK during WWII?
- 📝 Why was Axis intelligence so poor in relation to Operation Uranus?
- 📝 Why did the French return all the Dutch Colonies to the Netherlands in Paris Treaty?
- 📝 Was Saladin Agnostic?
- 📝 What is the basis for the argument that the true believers in Juche died in the N. Korean famine?
- 📝 When was the first usage of the slogan "Wer hat uns verraten..."?
- 📝 Did Victorian(-era) British officers knowingly fire their revolvers at targets clearly out of range?
- 📝 Did the polytheist Greeks or Romans call their priests “father”?
- 📝 What uniform is my Cossack great great grandfather wearing?
- 📝 Was electricity free in the Soviet Union?
- 📝 Why did US annex Hawaii?
- 📝 Did Woodland period Native Americans seek/value gold prior to European Colonization?
- 📝 How was sugar consumed by industrial revolution workers?
- 📝 How Did the Mongol Empire Get So Big?
- 📝 Are there any specific events which grants a soldier permission to execute a prisoner on sight? (Like in the movie: Fury)
- 📝 What were the civic privileges created for the Jews by Porcius Festus?
- 📝 What did people of the middle ages call their periods?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Why were the people from the Southeast in the US so different from the rest of the US?
- 📝 Why were people from the Asian Steppes able to militarily dominate Europeans on a repeated basis?
- 📝 Who were some of the specific people in the Renaissance who wrote about their period being different from the Middle Ages?
- 📝 Why were nomadic tribes (like the Mongols) from the Eurasian steppes a much reduced threat from the 15th century onwards?
- 📝 Why were the Irish exempt from conscription during WWI?
- 📝 Why were women excluded from the succession line in the Meiji constitution?
- 📝 What were the thoughts of the Celts, Romans and other ancient European people about the standing stones which survive from prehistoric times?
- 📝 Why were gravediggers, actors and former gladiators (but not slaves) banned from the Colosseum?
- 📝 Why were Muslims in Western Thrace and Christians in Constantinople excluded from the population exchange?
- 📝 How were political factions in the late Roman republic different from political parties today?
- 📝 Why did Franklin D. Roosevelt confiscate gold from the American people during the Great Depression?
- 📝 Were Serbs and Croats one people / tribe in the past? If not, why do they speak the same language?
- 📝 Why were Sri Lanka and Myanmar separated from India under the British Empire?
- 📝 Were the Assyrians and the Akkadians different people or the same people under a different name?
- 📝 Why were the Istein and Schliengen enclaves transferred from Switzerland to Baden?
- 📝 Did people from the cities of Uruk, Ur and Sumer have knowledge/recollection of how old their cities were (say, recollection after 2000 BCE)?
- 📝 If Rome's women were the cause of her downfall, why did the Romans not import women from abroad?
- 📝 Why don't/can't the different ethnolinguistic groups of people in erstwhile Yugoslavia get along with each other?
- 📝 Why did Native Americans die from European diseases while Europeans didn't catch serious diseases from the New World?
- 📝 Why was Poland spared from the Black Death?
- 📝 Why did Columbus cross the mid-Atlantic instead of exploring from Greenland?
- 📝 Why were the Romans unable to conquer Germania?
- 📝 Why were so many more Jewish men than Jewish women killed during the Holocaust?
- 📝 If the Union Jack joins the flag of England and Scotland, why does it have a different shade of blue than the Scottish flag?
- 📝 Why were the Allies so much better cryptanalysts?
- 📝 Why does German money from the 1940s not bear Nazi symbols?
- 📝 Why didn't Britain's nuclear weapons deter Argentina from invading the Falklands?
- 📝 Why were helmets and other body armour not commonplace in the 1800s?
- 📝 ‘Avoid sleeping on your back’ & ‘breathe in toilet smells’ were seen as precautions against the Black Death. Why did doctors think these would work?
- 📝 Why were the West African islands uninhabited?