Page 339 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - USA

INTRODUCING THE DEEP SOUTH  337

THE DEEP SOUTH

With its warm, semitropical climate and easygoing temperament, the
Deep South is a culturally diverse region of the United States. Multiethnic
and all-embracing in a friendly, hospitable way, the region offers visitors an
unforgettable introduction to Southern charm, as embodied by the pleasure-
seeking lifestyle of New Orleans.

Some 14 million people live in the fortunes were made. However, the
Deep South, in a region covering about industry’s labor-intensive demands were
200,000 sq miles (517,998 sq km), which based on the inequities of slavery, which
is similar in size and population density to have haunted the economy and culture
neighboring Texas. The four states of this of the Deep South for two centuries.
region are really quite different from one
another. Louisiana embodies French History
Catholic culture, whereas Mississippi and Some of the region’s earliest known
Alabama were the heart of the Confederacy inhabitants were the agricultural
during the Civil War. Arkansas differs in its communities of the Mississippian culture,
rugged landscape matched by its residents’ whose members cultivated extensive fields
pride in the state’s mountain heritage. of corn, beans, and squash, and constructed
Most residents of the primarily rural elaborate mounds for their religious and
Deep South have family roots reaching political rituals. The 3,700-year-old effigy
deep into history, and a rare continuity mounds at Poverty Point in northeastern
exists between past and present. Louisiana – one of North America’s oldest,
The rich bottomlands that line the largest, and most significant archaeological
meandering path of the Mississippi River remains – dates from this period.
across parts of Mississippi, Arkansas, and When Spanish conquistador Hernando
Louisiana once yielded the world’s largest de Soto and his troops first encountered
crops of cotton, and it was here that the Mississippian communities, they soon
some of the greatest early American decimated the people and their culture.

The steamboat Natchez leaving Mississippi River port
Colorfully painted ironwork gracing a building in New Orleans, Louisiana

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