(10-23-2022, 09:56 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(10-23-2022, 08:59 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Much of the South had an "honor" culture in which perceived insults can result in violence. At one time such could be duels. Up North, such was unacceptable. Those who use excessive force to protect their self-image go to jail.
Southern "white culture" is closer to Southern "black" culture (referring to the Deep South as opposed to the Mountain South that has few African-Americans outside of such large cities as Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, Louisville, and St. Louis... maybe Tulsa) and the most likely meeting place for discussions will be churches. I suspect that Southern whites trust African-American preachers who promote the same ethical values. Both Mountain South whites and Deep South Whites have little in common with white people Up North.
There is a difference between hair trigger pride and hot tempers (bad) vs putting verbally abusive people with bad manners and boundaries in their place (good). Both are present in the South.
Your comment about black culture and southern white culture being similar is spot on. Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" is a must-read on this topic. On one hand, it slants a bit too far in favor of the negatives imo, but on the other hand, it's one of the hilarious roasts of both ghetto people and white rednecks I've ever seen, especially as they tend to be mortal enemies and would resent the comparison. Being an elderly black gentleman who grew up in Harlem, he can get away with saying a lot more than most would be able to pull off.
Impulse control is essential to a good life. It allows one to stick with something worth sticking through and keeps one from doing something permanently destructive or disgraceful. I've been a substitute teacher, and one thing that I have learned is that one must ordinarily find a way to back down. That may not always be possible, as with assaults or certain "fighting words" that rhyme with trigger, rag, and "puck cue". Life often entails one frustration after another, and of course the more responsible one's job the more difficulties one can expect (unless one refer to povert or abuse by customers toward the low end of the scale of employment. Not everyone who walks into a car dealership is a sure customer, which explains why car salespeople make much higher incomes than people who simply act as cashiers at a convenience store. Should I ever sell cars I am going to remember that a car seat is furniture and use that as a selling point.
Much of the preparation for extraordinary performance in the arts, academia, athletics, and most professions is sheer drudgery. How much effort must a prospective violinist for a symphony orchestra put into playing an E-major or C-sharp minor keys (four sharps) A--flat major or F-minor (four flats)... playing those scales smoothly is not easy and is far from musical mastery. It is a necessary start for some works. Seemingly anyone can do raw labor or unimaginative toil. Going beyond that can take years of preparation.
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If stuck in a motel in a God-awful place because it is along the expressway, one potentially-enlightening deed is to look at the phone book. In rural northern Indiana (Industrial or farming North) one will find plenty of Polish and Italian surnames. Little Caesar's. Domino's, and Pizza Hut may be among Italian restaurants, but they are few of them. In parts of rural Indiana (Mountain South -- southern Indiana has much more in common with Tennessee highlands than even with the flat plains of northern Indiana) one will not see so many 'exotic' surnames. (German and Irish surnames are everywhere). This will tell whether a place once welcomed immigrants. if nothing else.
A telling work on American History is David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which relates how early patterns of settlement and subsequent migrations created the regional differences in American local culture. If, as in southern New England the descendants of the early Puritans moved west to richer farmlands, the immigrants who replaced them (first Irish Catholics) took over the local institutions other than churches and made them theirs. Irish political machines supplanted WASP political machines.
Basically the early patterns were as such:
New England (Puritans). Largely middle-class and from southeastern England, they believed in Church, law (they liked their communities orderly), and education (they established Harvard University in 1636, barely fifteen years after surviving a horrid New England winter -- all the better for coherent sermons and legal practice. Few people would have settled New England; it had no precious metals or high-return agriculture (tobacco, sugar, indigo) or precious metals to sell for a profit back in Merry Old England. The most valuable mineral was granite, good only as a building material. Soils were rocky, so they required much labor to till. New England was too cold for Africans except for some coastal areas, so slavery never took hold. But -- the coastline is irregular enough that fishing is a viable supplement to not-so-great agriculture. Commerce flourished. Hartford, Connecticut was an early center of insurance to protect people with interests in ships and cargoes from economic calamity.
The Puritans had no tolerance for drunkenness, brawling, or garden-variety crime. The legal system worked efficiently to the detriment of criminals (something like Japan today, a criminal's nightmare due to efficient policing and courts, and thought control upon prisoners). There were few First Peoples to fight or exploit (contrast much of the rest of the Americas except perhaps for Quebec. With little drinking, no tobacco, little brawling, little tolerance for sexual hanky-panky, Puritan America had freakishly-long, even modern, life expectancies for a pre-industrial society.
The Quakers came from the English midlands, and they brought over a contempt for ornamentation and display. They built their houses to the street, not needing lawns for display even of gardens. They were more egalitarian on gender than others (Fischer attributes this to Viking settlement of the the Danelaw. Vikings treated their wives better than any people in pre-modern times. Commerce was OK, but most people had trades, and a trade was a badge of honor. They did not have the extreme reverence for formal education that the Puritans had, as college degrees were themselves the damnable 'ornaments' of life. Literacy was an expectation. The Quakers got along beautifully with Mennonites from Switzerland and the Palatinate, who believed much the same things. To be sure, southeastern Pennsylvania is warm enough for plantation-style slavery as northern Virginia; the Quakers saw slavery as an abomination and would not tolerate it.
The Cavaliers from the British Southwest who settled from Chesapeake Bay to Georgia were still living with feudal norms of economic exploitation. They sought to bring serf-like crofters with them... but who was going to make the dangerous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean for more of the same that they knew in England? The Cavaliers took large tracts of land and brought over indentured servants to do the hard labor of farming. The cavaliers could not find enough of them, so they settled on... slaves. The Cavaliers obliterated any culture brought over from Africa and of course any organization. The slaves were obliged to act much like the peons of southwestern England even down to singing the same songs. This well fit the subtropical lowlands from just south of Philadelphia to the modern Florida-Georgia state line initially. Education was excellent for the elites, but minimal for anyone else. Religion was largely the Church of England, where it had recently supplanted Catholicism.
One further settlement was of the peoples of northern England, southern Scotland, and Northern Ireland (especially the "Scots-Irish"). Many were herdsmen, and they were a wild-and-wooly lot. People involved in animal herding (destroyed after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715) tend to have an "honor" culture to protect property, which for them is largely their livestock. Cattle rustling that would mark much of the violence of the Wild West was in practice there. So was lynching. They would not get along with any other settlers of the other three folkways except by going to the Backwoods away from the prying eyes of the highly-organized Puritans, the staid Quakers, or the hierarchical Cavaliers.
(OK -- what of the Dutch colony of New Netherland? First, it did not last long. It wasn't particularly Dutch, and the multicultural character of new York City existed when it was new Amsterdam. The Dutch gave refuge to French and Walloon Huguenots who had the same religion as the Dutch Reformed Church. There were German soldiers and Scandinavian sailors. There were Greek refugees from the Turks. Plenty of people had Spanish or Portuguese surnames, but these were not Catholic Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, or the like. There were religious dissidents from New England. They were Jewish refugees from the Inquisition. If one was hostile to the Catholic Church one was welcome in New Amsterdam
The English found it easy to take over once the Dutch traded it for Surinam. The Puritans were avid traders, and they were likely to do their trading with Flanders, the Netherlands, and northern Germany. The Dutch were much like the Puritans anyway, By the time in which New Amsterdam became New York, the people were not particularly Dutch. The Puritans could assimilate them.
The other is the comparatively-late US acquisition of Louisiana... it is unique and colorful, but it is also small.
People generally moved west as veritable clans -- not as individual adventurers. They moved almost due west as a rule (except for escaping slaves). Appalachia and the Ozarks are difficult to distinguish, and they blend through the right bank of the Ohio River. Note well what I said above of northern and southern Indiana. The divide between the Mountain South and the Deep South ensured that a state like Tennessee split almost evenly between them and had its own civil war. The Backwoods types had no desire to die to protect slavery. They hated slavery, but they hated the slaves just as much as agents of the planter elites.
Over time, one of the marked characteristics of the regions is the receptiveness to immigrants. Just thumb through the phone books.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.