Pam --

Amen to your thoughts on respect.
Your last paragraph also provides us with a much-needed opportunity to back on a CW-related topic.

Edward L. Ayers writes about overseas interest in the South in, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History. A chapter entitled "Where the North is the South" describes his experiences teaching Southern history in a Dutch university.

My Dutch students and colleagues did understand regionalism, however. I came to see that they were proud and defensive about living in the north of the Netherlands. Several of them claimed ancestry from Friesland, the ancient province in the northwest of their country, and proudly demonstrated for me the unique language spoken there. They were grateful when I recognized that Holland was merely one part of their nation and that their country had a more inclusive name. They warned me when I headed to Amsterdam for meetings that people would make fun of Groningen, as indeed they did. The residents of the densely populated cities and towns of the west saw the two hours separating my university from the metropole as a distance significant in climate, culture, and sophistication. In their eyes, the north was colder and wetter, lacking in most redeeming qualities, full of empty space and cattle. It was as if the United States had been turned upside down.

I came to understand the pride behind the sign at the train station that proclaimed WELCOME TO THE NORTH. A bumper sticker on sale at the travel bureau showed a farmer wearing wooden shoes, and with a cow looking on, kicking a tourist. In case, the picture wasn't clear, the slogan in English was: "Groningen: Love It or Leave It."

[page 98]

A sense of place, and the resentment, pride and arrogance that accompany it, appeared throughout Europe just as it does in the South. If anything, that sense of place was even stronger in the Old World, more concentrated and localized, more nuanced and inflected, deeper and more bitter. Regionalism is a language that the Dutch, the Germans, the Italians, the French and the British easily understand. They can easily understand the idea of the South and the war that continues to define it.

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