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.
Preaching Grace on the Square 
Jonathan, you have opened up a HUGE topic! In some ways “The South” is very much like other parts of the country that are predominantly made up of of rural and small town societies: stable, long term residents, who have known each other for at least three or four generations and often six or more. Many families have intermarried so that a lot of kinfolk live in the area. So the basic rule is: “Never say anything about anybody, Bless their hearts!” This makes for deep emotional attachments and equally deep hostilities — a sort of tribal mentality where symbols and fetishes (e.g. Gamecocks and Tigers) abound.
I knew the something similar in New England, Ohio and even in California. The main difference is that in more recently settled regions like California, where “old” families means the mid to late 19th century or even pre-WWII, everything seems more open because people have not been living there long enough to put down very deep roots.
In the North, people look on their history differently because they were the victors in the Civil War; they were more prosperous to start with and were never subjected to “occupation”, so it was easier to move on during the past century and focus on the future instead of the past.
Yet even the “New South” is special in large part because it fosters an intellectual climate that is at once inward-looking and focused on victim-hood: the “Lost Cause,” which is portrayed in romantic terms (think “Tara”) that obscure and frequently seem designed to excuse the oppression on which the social system of slavery was founded. It also serves to distract from the very recent history of resistance to the civil rights movement that was fought so bitterly in much of the region. These patterns of rationalization persist in part because there is a veritable cottage industry of writers, preachers, songwriters, politicians and journalists that benefit from promoting them.
The consequences can be quite bizarre. For example, millions of dollars are appropriated by the SC legislature to raise and preserve a Confederate submarine that sank before it fired its torpedo, but nothing is provided to unemployed workers who have exhausted their benefits, Medicaid payments to the poor are cut, and support for education at all levels is reduced, all in the name of frugality.
These are a few of the things that make the South at once charming, picturesque, and enticing to outsiders who come to visit and maddening and quite oppressive to the large number of undereducated, unskilled, and disadvantaged folks who live here.