Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Cotton Belt
: A region where cotton was the main crop, extending from South
Carolina to Texas, including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The
heart of the agricultural and slaveholding Old South. While cotton production today
is no longer a monoculture and much of it has been replaced by diversified
agriculture, cotton continues to be harvested in some regions (such as the Yazoo
Delta in Mississippi) and tends to migrate towards Southwestern states.
Crescent city
: A nineteenth-century nickname for New Orleans, then confined
within the crescent formed by the natural levee of the East bank.
Cypress swamp
: Unlike marshes, swamps are forested wetlands. Flooded cypress
forests are located throughout the southern United States. Bald cypress trees are
conifers that lose their needles in winter and can withstand seasonal or permanent
flooding of the land where they grow in fresh water. Cypress wood is rot resistant
and became popular as timber in the 19th century and a large area of first growth
Cypress swamps had been fully harvested before the First World War. Some
swamps have been preserved as protected nature preserves, for instance, Big
Cypress, in Florida.
D
Divisions
: The US territory is divided into nine groups of neighboring states.
These statistical divisions are not true geographic regions.
Dixie/Dixieland
: Common term for the 11 Confederate slave states whose
secession in 1860 sparked the Civil War (Civil War, 1861-65). Dixie and Dixieland
are also names for New Orleans style jazz. The origins of the term are somewhat
obscure, but can be linked to a 1860 Louisiana banknote for ten dollars, a number
which in French would be spelled
dix
. Alternatively, the term could be related to a
semantic deformation of the Mason-Dixon line, a line of demarcation between the
northern colonies (Delaware, Pennsylvania) and Maryland, a part of the slave South.
Domestic Feminism
: In the context of the Protestant ethic of the American 19th
century, domestic feminism as advocated by the Beecher sisters [BEE 69]
establishes a division of labor between women and men. The home and the
neighborhood, the setting for children's education, should resemble a village as far
as possible in order to ensure that children lead healthy lives free of sin. According
to Cynthia Gobin-Ghorra [GHO 03], the ideology fostered early acceptance of urban
sprawl in US cities.
