Southern United States

The Southern United States, also known as Dixie, the Southern States, or the American South, is one of four regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, occupying the area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Western United States, with the Midwest and Northeast to its north and the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico to its south. Its boundaries historically followed the eighteenth century Mason-Dixon line, the Ohio River, and the 36 degree 30 minute parallel, and the region contains subregions including the Southeast, the South Central states, the Upper South, and the Deep South, though states such as Maryland, Delaware, the District of Columbia, and northern Virginia have grown more aligned with Northeastern culture and politics even as the Census Bureau still classifies them as Southern. The region's development was profoundly shaped by slavery from the early 1600s through the mid-1800s, especially in the Deep South and along the coast, a legacy that produced lasting racial disparities, Jim Crow segregation that lasted until the 1960s, and the widespread disenfranchisement of Black voters through poll taxes and other mechanisms, with some areas of the South identified by scholars as authoritarian enclaves during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era.