bumpin that (x8): the test is that European immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries largely avoided the South, and they did not avoid Maryland

Let me introduce you to a little something called the Potomac River—which is in the North, because Virginia's state line doesn't start till the far riverbank, suck it, traitors

This is Mason-Dixon Line erasure.

didn’t maryland notably not secede, thus rendering definitively Not A Southern State?

Yeah, it's complicated because Maryland *was* Southern, if always somewhat odd because of its Christian pluralism, but the rise of Baltimore as a commercial port & the state's population boom 1840-60 unsouthernized it & aligned the state with Northern democracy & interests just in time for the war.

the test is that European immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries largely avoided the South, and they did not avoid Maryland

you have weird little exceptions like Texas Germans and Louisiana Isleños but if a state was outside the South it was flooded with immigration from Europe for some part of the Ellis Island era

ah and I was wrong about when Isleños arrived so scratch that example

Texas is weird because it's big enough to both be a marginally Southern state & be an unquestionably Southern state simultaneously. It's like asking if Indiohiokentuckennessee is a Southern state.

Texas is a Southern state and a Southwestern state, just as Pennsylvania is a Eastern state and a Midwestern state. Or Kansas being Midwest/Great Plains.

"Believe me brother I know"

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