I’m going to be tracking how the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War plays out in popular culture. I lived in the South for fifteen years and was fascinated by the way in which the legacy of slavery and Civil War continued to resonate. The New York Times has an article about the ongoing attempt by many Southerners to de-couple the secession movement from slavery. So, we have a ball in Charleston to commemorate the attack on Ft. Sumter.

For non-Southerners, the South is a place of mystery that defies comprehension. That’s true elsewhere, too. So we have today mention of an exhibition of photos from the South in London. For those of us Americans who are not Southerners, the rather ominous observation:

‘You only begin to understand America when you reach the South,’ writes Jon Snow

I disagree. The South presents a particular aspect of America, perhaps distilled, or intensified, but it is not America. The extremes of America are more extreme, more pronounced in the South than elsewhere in the US. The religion more narrowly focused on God and country, sin and repentance; the economic disparities more exacerbated, the racial relationships more complex. To say that one understands America only when one reaches the South is to deny the American reality of New England, California, and, as I’ve come to learn after living away from it for thirty years, even the Midwest.