The Culture of the Southern United States, or Southern Culture, is a subculture of the United States that is perhaps America's most distinct, in the minds both of its residents and of those in other parts of the country. The combination of its unique history and the fact that many Southerners maintain—and even nurture—an identity separate from the rest of the country has led to its being the most studied and written about region of the United States.
"More than any other part of America, the South stands apart. Thousands of Northerners and foreigners have migrated to it...but Southerners they will not become. For this is still a place where you must have either been born or have 'people' there, to feel it is your native ground. "Natives will tell you this. They are proud to be Americans, but they are also proud to be Virginians, South Carolinians, Tennesseeans, Mississippians and Texans. But they are conscious of another loyalty too, one that transcends the usual ties of national patriotism and state pride. It is a loyalty to a place where habits are strong and memories are long. If those memories could speak, they would tell stories of a region powerfully shaped by its history and determined to pass it on to future generations."
— Tim Jacobson, Heritage of the South
Southern culture has been and remains generally more socially conservative than that of the rest of the country. Because of the central role of agriculture in the antebellum economy, society remained stratified according to land ownership, and communities often developed strong attachment to their churches as the primary community institution.
From its many cultural influences, the South developed its own unique customs, literature, cuisine and musical styles (such as country music, bluegrass, rockabilly, southern gospel, jazz, blues and rock and roll).
Read more about Culture Of The Southern United States: People, Religion, Southern Dialect, Regional Variations, Cuisine, Literature, Music, Sports, Film, Television, Popular Images of Southerners, Art
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“Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States, which make such a noise in the world,—never hear of America, so called from the name of a European gentleman.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“In one notable instance, where the United States Army and a hundred years of persuasion failed, a highway has succeeded. The Seminole Indians surrendered to the Tamiami Trail. From the Everglades the remnants of this race emerged, soon after the trail was built, to set up their palm-thatched villages along the road and to hoist tribal flags as a lure to passing motorists.”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)