Antiques.(southern culture)

 
Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why 
do they live there. Why do they live at all. 
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 1936 

Tell about the South," says Quentin Compson's roommate at Harvard, a Canadian named Shreve McCannon, who is curious about the region beyond the Ohio River. And Quentin, whose background is a little like Faulkner's own, answers, "You cant understand it. You would have to be born there." And, writing more than sixty years ago, W. J. Cash observed in his celebrated The Mind of the South (1941): "There exists among us a profound conviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation."

But, can the South be distinguished as a coherent culture different from the rest of the United States? Attributes we consider characteristic of the South, such as its agricultural plantation economy and black slavery, began as early as the seventeenth century. And by 1750, a generation before Americans went to war against Great Britain to secure their political independence, such issues as social class and race continued to make for differences between the mostly rural southern colonies and those of the more urban Northeast and Middle Atlantic regions. Those differences persisted during the American Revolution and intensified during the first half of the nineteenth century, even as the South became more industrialized and urban, and southerners increasingly spoke of themselves as southerners.

No one articulated the idea of southernness more clearly than the Virginian Thomas Jefferson. In 1785, for the benefit of the French writer Francois Jean, marquis de Chastellux, Jefferson spelled out what he called "my idea of the character of the several states." Northerners were "cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others ... superstitious and hypocritical in their religion." Southerners, by contrast, were, "fiery, Voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others ... without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart."

In the eyes of most southerners, the victory of Jefferson in gaining ...