Am I reading this correctly in that Chicago is the only section with dashes indicating a blend of regions?
Seems accurate but interesting this is the only area with crossover.
Seems accurate but interesting this is the only area with crossover.
I live pretty much on the border between two regions on the map, and you can definitely see a difference just driving one county north or south. But of course you also see exceptions on both sides, in both individual homes or small towns that seem more suited for the other side of the border.
We can ignore current settlement patterns because Woodard does. In a recent paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...) he does explain the methodology, although I don't have access - but from the snippets I can see it appears that he's essentially trying to work out who the first European settlers in each area were. So it doesn't matter that north Fulton County is full of carpetbaggers from up North and immigrants. (I write this as I sit in an office in north Fulton County; I am a carpetbagger from up North and many of my co-workers are immigrants.)
It makes sense for the split to be along county lines just because a lot of data will be available at the county level, but it occasionally produces absurd results. I occasionally have mocked these splits as "I drive to Appalachia for ramen", because I used to live in DeKalb County about a mile from the DeKalb-Gwinnett county line - according to Woodard's map, DeKalb is "Deep South" and Gwinnett is "Appalachia" - and I liked a ramen place just over the county line. (Since then both I and the ramen place have moved.)
This is similar to something I saw on reddit over the weekend which was a similar map but based on local cuisine. I live in North Fulton County now, but I'm originally from central Alabama and the dividing line for the cuisine was between "soul food" and whatever other term they had come up for deep fried food
Basically it was white people southern food vs. black people southern food (which, at the end of the day is actually not that different)
curious if this Appalachia vs. "Deep South" thing is really just a racial divide in the data with "Deep South" being African American descendants of slaves across the Black Belt and Appalachia being the more white population
The map in this post is historically based, I think, but they don't say that very loudly.
And definitely some of what we're seeing in this data is a racial divide - but the racial divide in the South goes back to where slave-based agriculture was and was not viable.