Dixie

Dixie, also known as Dixieland or Dixie's Land, is a nickname for all or part of the Southern United States. While there is no official definition of this region (and the included areas have shifted over the years), or the extent of the area it covers, most definitions include the U.S. states below the Mason–Dixon line that seceded and comprised the Confederate States of America, almost always including the Deep South. The term became popularized throughout the United States by songs that nostalgically referred to the American South.

Geographically, Dixie usually means the cultural region of the Southern states. However, definitions of Dixie vary greatly. Dixie may include only the Deep South (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, etc.) or the states that seceded during the American Civil War.

"Dixie" states in the modern sense usually refer to:

Although Maryland is not often considered part of Dixie today, it is below the Mason–Dixon line. If the origin of the term Dixie is accepted as referring to the region south and west of that line (which excludes Delaware despite it having been a slave state in 1861), Maryland lies within Dixie. It can be argued that Maryland was part of Dixie before the Civil War, especially culturally. In this sense, it would remain so into the 1970s, until an influx of people from the Northeast made the state and its culture significantly less Southern (especially Baltimore and the suburbs of Washington, D.C.). However, Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore still remain culturally Southern and share many traits associated with Dixie.

As for the nation's capital itself: "Whether Washington should be defined as a Southern city has been a debate since the Civil War, when it was the seat of the Northern government but a hotbed of rebel sympathy", the Washington Post wrote in 2011. "The Washington area's 'Southernness' has fallen into steep decline, part of a trend away from strongly held regional identities. In the 150th anniversary year of the start of the Civil War, the region at the heart of the conflict has little left of its historic bond with Dixie." President Kennedy complained about the worst aspects of Washington's Northern and Southern influence, calling Washington, DC "a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm".

The Florida Big Bend includes a Dixie County. Certain parts of Oklahoma and Missouri that are considered more culturally Southern than the rest of these two states have been nicknamed Little Dixie (Oklahoma) and Little Dixie (Missouri).

The location and boundaries of Dixie have become increasingly subjective and mercurial.^{[verification needed]} Today, Dixie is most often associated with parts of the Southern United States where traditions and legacies of the Confederate era and the Antebellum South live most strongly. The concept of Dixie as the location of a certain set of cultural assumptions, mindsets, and traditions was explored in the book The Nine Nations of North America (1981).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the origin of this nickname remains obscure. The most common theories, according to A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (1951) by Mitford M. Mathews include the following: