South, The

South, The, a diverse region including all or parts of the states of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. Varying climates, soils, and topography have produced a multiplicity of landscapes: the tidewater plain along the Atlantic coast, the rolling Piedmont of central Virginia and the Carolinas, the Appalachian Mountains ranging down to Georgia and Alabama, the piney woods along the Gulf coast across to East Texas, and the rich soils of the Mississippi River delta and Alabama Black Belt. The region is defined less by geography than by its history and culture, which, while also diverse, constitute the core of regional identity. The South's population, its economic relationship to the rest of the country, and its particular historical experience have been sufficiently distinctive to shape both its identity and its place in the nation.

The French and Spanish explored and laid claims along the Gulf coast and the Mississippi River, and the Spanish established the earliest permanent European settlement at St. Augustine in 1565. The colony at Jamestown (1607) led to significant English settlement in the Middle Atlantic region. Later settlements by the Scots‐Irish and Germans in the Piedmont, by French Huguenots in South Carolina, and by Acadians, or Cajuns (descendants of French‐speaking farmers deported from Canada's maritime provinces by the British in the 1750s), in Louisiana, added variety to the European population. A most significant migration was the forced settlement of enslaved Africans, beginning as early as 1619.

Slaves accounted for as much as a third of the population in some southern colonies by 1750. Their presence, and the predominance of agriculture—cotton, rice, tobacco, sugar, and indigo—delineated much of the region's character and future. Although at the mercy of their masters, slaves, as well as free blacks, preserved some elements of their cultures and the dignity of work and family life. Most southern whites did not own slaves, but the political and economic influence of large plantation agriculture, and the controls necessary to sustain a system of chattel slavery, permeated southern society by the beginning of the Antebellum Era.

The indigenous Indian tribes in the region—Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole—were coerced into treaties relinquishing their lands in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi, and were forcibly removed, over the “Trail of Tears,” to Indian Territory in Oklahoma during the 1830s. A Seminole band retreated to the Everglades where they resisted resettlement, but were nearly exterminated by 1845.

Tensions over slavery and sectional self‐determination led to heightened southern nationalism and, eventually, to the Civil War and the economic dislocation that followed. The Reconstruction Era and its aftermath laid the foundations for the South's return to the national fold, but did not bring racial reconciliation. The end of slavery provided new opportunities for African Americans, but the post–Reconstruction Era brought a new system of racial segregation that insured continued white dominance.

Economic development and urban growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inspired talk of a “New South.” Ambitious ventures in raw‐materials processing, mining, and manufacturing, and the rapid growth of interior cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, and Nashville, narrowed the gap between the region and the rest of the country. But the southern economy retained a dependent relationship on the more extensive and sophisticated industries and financial institutions of the Northeast and Middle West. Consequently, by the Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt identified the region as “the nation's number one economic problem.” In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans memorably evoked the harsh life of Depression‐Era southern sharecroppers.

Even more dramatic social and economic changes after World War II heralded a revolution in southern race relations that culminated in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and fractured the infrastructure of white supremacy. These events again underscored the significance of southern history and culture in the national story. The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed unprecedented demographic, technological, and economic changes in the South, and brought it more within the national mainstream as part of the rapidly developing “Sunbelt.” The modern South's interstate highway system, major businesses, modern communications networks, professional sports teams, and large numbers of black elected officials all testified to the extent of these changes, as did the fact that this region supplied four U.S. presidents between 1960 and 2000: Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, and Bill Clinton. Despite the transformations, however, the South retained many of its traditional values and burdens. Regional folklore, traditional music, and a powerful strain of evangelical Protestantism all helped shape this legacy.

Southern culture and identity were embedded, too, in a flourishing literature that included such Antebellum Era writers as Edgar Allan Poe and reached its heights in such twentieth‐century writers and playwrights as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. From the rich folklore and humor of the southern frontier in the eighteenth century to the oral traditions of black slaves to the blues, gospel music, and jazz, as well as the florid rhetoric of the southern pulpit, the region's literature and popular culture drew strength from the moral challenges of slavery and the harsh realities of southern poverty. Southern history has been a deep well that replenished the imagination and cast a unique perspective on the nation's experience.
See also African American Religion; Baptists; Cherokee Cases; Cotton Industry; Depressions, Economic; Economic Development; French Settlements in North America; Gospel Music, African American; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Removal Act; Regionalism; Religion; Seminole Wars; Sharecropping and Tenantry; Spanish Settlements in North America; Tobacco Industry.

Bibliography

C. Vann Woodward , Origins of the New South, 1877–1913, 1951.
Wilbur J. Cash , The Mind of the South, 1941.
Jack Bass and Thomas Terrill, eds., The American South Comes of Age, 1986.
Edward L. Ayers , The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 1992.
Numan V. Bartley , The New South, 1945–1980, 1995.
Carole E. Hill and Patricia D. Bearer, eds., Cultural Diversity in the U.S. South: Anthropological Contributions to a Region in Transition, 1998.
Stephen David Kantrowicz , Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, 2000.

Blaine A. Brownell