Maryland is NOT the south: A geographical analysis

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Be forewarned: I’m about to employ every nerdy, fact-obsessed facet of my advanced degrees in geography to dispel notions of Maryland being included in the cultural or geographical American South.

As a geographer, the placement of Maryland in the metaphorical “American South” has always puzzled and annoyed me.

Perhaps my obnoxiously stringent attention to facts and details makes this one of my biggest pet peeves among niche issues in my field. Or maybe it’s the advanced degrees in geography. Or that I’ve lived in three northern (PA, NY and MD) and three southern states (MS, LA, FL) for extended period of times.

The topic seems to be floating around again as nihilists imagine a new Civil War.

Thus I am providing a thorough academic review of why Maryland is not part of the American South — through a series of analysis and maps.

We’ll start with the physical Earth aspects (global positioning, climate, flora and fauna) and move into history, culture and politics.

I received an alert that I’ve embedded too many maps and this post is too long to be sent entirely by email, so if you’re reading this through email, be sure to click through and read the full post on the Substack site.

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Geographical Considerations

When discussing states by the attributes of “north” and “south,” geography should be the first (and I would argue definitive) consideration. We’ll address the cultural north and south a bit later, but let’s start with the planetary north and south first.

Latitude

If you divide the eastern seaboard exactly in the middle from the southern-most point to the northern-most point, you would split the country at the border of Virginia and North Carolina.

Southern-most point: 25 degrees South (Florida)
Northern-most point: 47 degrees North (Maine)
Exact center: 36 degrees north (near the VA-NC border)

If you do the same thing across the entire continental US, and not just the eastern seaboard, the line barely moves because the northern-most point would be 49 degrees North in Washington state.