Southern United States

The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South— is an area in the southeastern and south-central United States. The region is known for its distinct culture and history, having developed its own customs, musical styles and varied cuisines that have helped distinguish it from the rest of the United States. The South owes its unique heritage to a variety of sources, including Native Americans; early European settlements of Spanish, English, German, French, Scotch-Irish, and Scottish; importation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans; historic dependence on slave labor; the presence of a large proportion of African Americans in the population; and the aftermath of the Confederacy after the Civil War.

Historically, the South relied heavily on agriculture, but has become more industrialized and urban since the second half of the 20th century, attracting national and international migrants. The American South is now among the fastest-growing areas in the United States. While there has been rapid economic growth, every Southern state with the exceptions of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and Florida has a higher poverty rate than the American average. Poverty is especially prevalent in rural areas. Sociological research indicates that Southern collective identity stems from political, demographic, and cultural distinctiveness. The region contains the Bible Belt, an area of high church attendance, especially Evangelical churches. Studies have shown that Southerners are more conservative than non-Southerners in several areas, including religion, morality, international relations and race relations. This is evident in both the region's religious attendance figures and in the support for the Republican Party in political elections since the 1960s.

Overall, the South has had lower percentages of high school graduates, lower housing values, lower household incomes, and lower cost of living than the rest of the United States. These factors, combined with the fact that Southerners have continued to maintain strong loyalty to family ties, has led some sociologists to label white Southerners a "quasi-ethnic regional group." In previous censuses, the largest ancestry group identified by Southerners was English or mostly English, with 19,618,370 self-reporting "English" as an ancestry on the 1980 census, followed by 12,709,872 listing "Irish" and 11,054,127 "Afro-American". Almost a third of all Americans who claim English ancestry can be found in the American South, and over a quarter of all Southerners claim English descent as well. The South also continues to have the highest percentage of African-Americans in the country.

Apart from its climate, the living experience in the South increasingly resembles the rest of the nation. The arrival of millions of Northerners (especially in the suburbs and coastal areas) and millions of Hispanics means the introduction of cultural values and social norms not rooted in Southern traditions. Observers conclude that collective identity and Southern distinctiveness are thus declining, particularly when defined against "an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, real, more unified and distinct." The process has worked both ways, however, with aspects of Southern culture spreading throughout a greater portion of the rest of the United States in a process termed "Southernization".