Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South

Abstract

We replicate and extend John Shelton Reed's classic work on regional identification by examining and modeling the prevalence of the words "Dixie" and "Southern" in business names across 100 cities and four decades. We find that the instances of "Dixie" have dropped precipitously, although identification with the word "Southern" has remained more constant, providing evidence of a trend we term re-southernization. We also find that the relative number of blacks in the population provides the most consistent explanation of regional identity. Population density has also emerged as a significant predictor of regional identification in more recent time periods. These findings contribute to the literature on regional identification, the politics of naming and the sociology of the South.

Adolescent mental health: the role of youth and college pastors

“…Furthermore, the current study is descriptive and based on a specific geographic region. This sample was limited to individuals in Texas, and the Southern United States tends to be more conservative than other regions in the country in many domains, including religion (Cooper & Knotts, 2010).…”

The Rocky Mountains And The Southwest: Using Feature Names To Study Two Iconic Subregions In The American West

“…To that end, rather than adding more and more terms to our lists of hypothesized regional place names, we build in a check on our results using an additional data source. Specifically, for several decades scholars have claimed that business names offer a glimpse into patterns of regional cultural identity (Zelinsky ; Reed ; Alderman ; Cooper and Knotts ; Cooper and others ; Liesch and others ). More recently, a link has been uncovered between culturally distinctive toponyms and regional business names, whereby high concentrations of the former tend to be good indicators of high concentrations of the latter (Weaver and Holtkamp ).…”

“…Informal boundaries that emerge from patterns of culturally distinctive toponyms produce a sort of vernacular regional geography that have enabled researchers to identify, operationalize, and study cultural regions in prior studies (Zelinsky ; Cooper and Knotts ; Cooper, Knotts, and Elders ; Weaver and Holtkamp ).…”

“…Much as cultural toponyms might reveal regional vernacular, scores of researchers have argued that place‐specific business names might be useful indicators of regional identity (Reed ; Zelinsky ; Alderman ; Cooper and Knotts ; Cooper and others ; Liesch and others ). For instance, Christopher Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts observe that:

business names have symbolic meaning.

…”

Region‐Urbanicity Differences in Locus of Control: Social Disadvantage, Structure, or Cultural Exceptionalism?

“…Because previous literature has critiqued census operationalization of the South (Vandello and Cohen ), we use a base year measure of state of residence to reclassify adolescents in West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia as Northeastern (Table S3). We follow the lead of researchers who consider the South to include the former Confederate states and states in which the majority of adults identify as Southern (Cooper and Knotts ). Results were very similar from models that used original Census classifications and from models that re‐classified adolescents in Texas and Oklahoma as Western rather than Southern.…”