Grounded Globalism helps me understand the Southern influences in my life that have made my own approach to the issues of globalism regionally distinctive. Peacock, in his own life and work, exemplifies what it means to be a grounded global Southerner. Instead of an abstract globalism with mythic benefits or demons, the grounded global Southerner takes on a global identity with attention to history, tradition, and place. Finally, he saw the strong regional identification of US Southerners in its transformed state entering into globalism and providing a model of grounding for it. Further, he saw a US South that was being transformed internally by the presence of the globe in its midst-for example the black-white divide was being changed by the many foreign nationals who have now immigrated to the US South, especially Hispanics but also many people from other places and cultures. He saw globalism as transforming the identity of US Southerners from an oppositional identity to the remainder of the United States, to fellow travelers with other Americans in a global society. PeacockвЂ™s thesis of grounded globalism, however, went beyond the possibility of a sympathetic relationship between US Southerners and other peoples of the world. Vann Woodward, Jon Smith, Deborah Cohn, and others have noted, the SouthвЂ™s history of defeat and colonization binds it with other Souths-with virtually everywhere, including Europe, that has also suffered.вЂќ 3 In part due to this, James Peacock wrote that the US South has the possibility of вЂњgrounded globalism.вЂќ 2 вЂњAs scholars Michael OвЂ™Brien, C.

For the South had undergone an experience that it could share with no other part of America-though it is shared by nearly all the peoples of Europe and Asia -the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction. It had learned to live for long decades in quite unВAmerican poverty, and it had learned the equally unВAmerican lesson of submission. It had learned to accommodate itself to conditions that it swore it would never accept, and it had learned the taste left in the mouth by the swallowing of oneвЂ™s own words. It had learned what it was to be faced with economic, social, and political problems that refused to yield to all the ingenuity, patience, and intelligence that a people could bring to bear upon them. The same could not be said of the US South:ДЇor the inescapable facts of history were that the South had repeatedly met with frustration and failure. He wrote of the legend of American success and victory: Americans in this legend were able to meet every challenge, domestic and foreign, through skill, luck and pluck, and triumph, and its armed forces were invincible. Vann Woodward in The Burden of Southern History (first published in 1960).

The possibility of identification by US Southerners with global Southerners was presented by C. There is an irony to this because old Southerners will recognize the attribution of poverty and backwardness applied to the Global South that was once applied to the US South and still is to a degree. Now the South also refers to the Global South and we speak of people of the North and of the South with different meanings. For me, being from the South meant one thing and only one thing, you were from one of the former Confederate States and you held certain cultural values. When I grew up, вЂњthe SouthвЂќ was an unambiguous term. I do know, however, that they grow collards in their yards and when they prepare a celebratory meal they often cook traditional Southern dishes. But because they mainly grew up in Denver and live there now, I donвЂ™t know how much being from the South means to them. While I lived outside the South in my twenties and thirties, I was relieved that both of my children were born in the South.

That made me a Southerner and from this many things followed. Born in the forties, I learned early that I was from the South, a certain geography. That maps affect the heart and mind is evident to Southerners. Indeed, a cartographer is a student of human behavior and seeks to bring about action on the information presented. It situates the observer in those relationships, induces relationships both cognitive and affective in the observer, and may lead to action. A map conveys more than factual knowledge. Symbolic representation, however, is the key element. A sequence of maps may also signify temporal relationships. In 1862, West Virginia separated from Virginia and joined the Union.ДЄ map is a symbolic representation, most commonly in two dimensions, of spatial relationships. While Missouri and Kentucky were claimed by the Confederate States of America they were never under its effective control. Map of the Southern States in HarperвЂ™s Weekly, February 23, 1861, available here, accessed July 14, 2016.

Grounded map