What do you think of the following as a broad-scope cultural map of the US, by county?

[If my soul was made of stone]

Imo, South Jersey def doesn't belong with the South, if anything it's more midwestern.

I hate that I'm being brought to defend this insane map, but there is in fact a rodeo in Salem County, NJ, which also has extremely Deep Southern racial dynamics in settlement patterns and voting and is in general a swampy nightmare, so there's an argument to be made. Cumberland County is a ways past the immortal Black/WASP duality to be in the same category, though.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Imo, South Jersey def doesn't belong with the South, if anything it's more midwestern.

I hate that I'm being brought to defend this insane map, but there is in fact a rodeo in Salem County, NJ, which also has extremely Deep Southern racial dynamics in settlement patterns and voting and is in general a swampy nightmare, so there's an argument to be made. Cumberland County is a ways past the immortal Black/WASP duality to be in the same category, though.

I had a classmate from Vineland once who spoke with a pronounced, unaffected twang and referred to himself as an ee-van-jellicle Methodist.

My girl, my girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night (come on and tell me, baby)
In the Pine Barrens, in the Pine Barrens, where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

[If my soul was made of stone]

Imo, South Jersey def doesn't belong with the South, if anything it's more midwestern.

I hate that I'm being brought to defend this insane map, but there is in fact a rodeo in Salem County, NJ, which also has extremely Deep Southern racial dynamics in settlement patterns and voting and is in general a swampy nightmare, so there's an argument to be made. Cumberland County is a ways past the immortal Black/WASP duality to be in the same category, though.

Having a rodeo and bad racial dynamics doesn't make an area Southern. You could probably find a similar area of, say, Indiana. But no one would say Indiana is partially or wholly Southern.

"Southern" is a fairly specific cultural identity that definitely doesn't include anywhere in South Jersey, or New Mexico, or even West Virginia (Appalachia to me a region that is culturally distinctive, at least north of Tennessee/North Carolina, from the American South)

This comment was fairly tongue-in-cheek, but there is something to be said about the totalization of Southernness across broader rural/small-town culture, as Nathan noted in his reply.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Imo, South Jersey def doesn't belong with the South, if anything it's more midwestern.

I hate that I'm being brought to defend this insane map, but there is in fact a rodeo in Salem County, NJ, which also has extremely Deep Southern racial dynamics in settlement patterns and voting and is in general a swampy nightmare, so there's an argument to be made. Cumberland County is a ways past the immortal Black/WASP duality to be in the same category, though.

Having a rodeo and bad racial dynamics doesn't make an area Southern. You could probably find a similar area of, say, Indiana. But no one would say Indiana is partially or wholly Southern.

"Southern" is a fairly specific cultural identity that definitely doesn't include anywhere in South Jersey, or New Mexico, or even West Virginia (Appalachia to me a region that is culturally distinctive, at least north of Tennessee/North Carolina, from the American South)

My close friend Meredith, a native Hoosier who's lived there for all but two or three of her roughly thirty years on this pale blue dot, refers to her state as "the middle finger of the South", so I don't think it's at all accurate to dismiss the idea that places like Evansville--or, again, Vineland--might have genuine Southern-adjacent cultural traits, even if they're obviously not part of ~The South~ per se.

Indiana was the swing state in the Third (and kinda Fourth too) Party System! jao

This discourse has become a meta-in-joke among my close friend group, but to me Indianapolis clearly has very Sun Belt-y dynamics of historical development and demographics/voting patterns; Fort Wayne has morphed convergently from more typical Midwestern regional city, albeit colored from the beginning by the strong influence of Catholic, Baptist, and Lutheran churches, to New Economy-driven and dwarfed by firebrand conservative suburbs. It's one of my personal hobby horses that the non-Appalachian Ohio Valley is a sui generis region, but Evansville of course also has many Southern signifiers (as with Cincy, Louisville, etc). Frankly, the only part of Indiana that I see as of a piece with the broader Midwest now that Southern-aligned and Yankee rural areas have converged is the South Bend–"Da Region" corridor.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Missouri isn't a southern state on net imo but tbh most of it's land area is. Most of the state south of the major cities, plus the Missouri Valley in between, is fairly southern in historical patterns. It's very much a judgment call.

The two genders: Little Dixie (Missouri) vs Little Dixie (Oklahoma)