Here is a great exercise in applied geography: “The Sweet Tea Line” at Neatorama, with a link to Eight Over Five with a wonderful set of interactive maps — though, if you go to the Eight Over Five site, you don’t find any link to this particular map (can anyone explain?).
One of the maps from Eight Over Five, using data to determine the Sweet Tea Line.
What about regional variations in food, language, customs or commerce in your state? I remember discovering that “regular coffee” in western Massachusetts meant coffee with a lot of cream and sugar. Not so at Boston’s Logan Airport. Where is the line? What about the lines of where a soft drink is “a pop,” versus “a soda pop,” versus “a coke,” versus “a soda?”
Californiaspeak is creeping out of California; Californians oddly call their freeways by the number prefaced by “the,” so what everyone else in the world calls “Interstate 5” or “I-5,” Californians call “The Five.” They make no distinctions between state and interstate roads, so California 101 is “The 101.” How far east has that affectation crept? I spoke to a friend in Phoenix who mentioned driving west on “The 10,” the road we in Texas more properly call “Interstate 10” (or ‘that cursed drive to El Paso — take a couple of gallons of Starbucks when you leave Kerrville, or Odessa if you’re comin’ from I-20′).
What other things can your classes map out?
This is a re-doing of the Mason-Dixon Line, the actual border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, set by two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, between 1763 and 1767. During the run-up to the Civil War, especially from debates on the Missouri Compromise, policy makers began to refer to the line, extended west across the continent, as the northern boundary of slave-holding jurisdictions, which roughly approximated the line west of Pennsylvania.
Today the line is a cultural demarcation, though often fuzzy. President John Kennedy once complained Washington, D.C., was an unfortunate melange of southern and northern characteristics: “a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm,” was what he said. In my early days of driving, AM radio stations in rural areas north of the line tended to play music in a pop format, which those south of the line often favored Grand Old Opry-tinged country music. (I think country music is more ubiquitous now — myself, I like both kinds of music, country and western.) Coming out of Salt Lake City, for example, along Interstate 80, generally one does not have “grits” as a breakfast option. Somewhere across Ohio, I-80 magically transforms to a Southern road, and across Pennsylvania grits can be had for breakfast (though not in the six varieties I had to choose from in Charleston, South Carolina, which is so deep in the South that they didn’t even have hash brown potatoes as a choice — heresy to this Idaho-bred boy). Grits are not available across northern Pennsylvania, in my experience. This demonstrates that the cultural boundary wiggles more than the actual border of the states.
And, in my search for Mason-Dixon links, I was reminded of the marvelous duet featuring Mark Knopfler and James Taylor, “Sailing to Philadelphia” (from Knopfler’s second solo album, by the same name) — this site, the English Department at Tampere University, tells the story of the song, but most of the links are dead. Ian Gurney, the author of that site, points to Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Mason & Dixon (originally 1997; Picador paperback since 2004).
We’re talking about putting human things on maps. Mason and Dixon were surveyors, and surveyors play a huge role in the development of America — think George Washington’s survey of the Ohio for Lord Fairfax, which got Washington title to 60,000 acres there, which got Washington to thinking about development of the nation across the Appalachians, which led to his creation of the Potomac & Ohio Canal, Co., and which also inspired his pushing young James Madison and young Alexander Hamilton to figuring out a charter for a new nation. Think Benjamin Banneker. Think the Northwest Ordinance, which was chiefly devised to “dispose” of lands in the then-Northwest Territories, and which required the surveying of townships, which also led to public education on the frontier. Think the Transcontinental Railroad, and the surveys of the land grants Congress gave to the railroads to get the job done (which land grants still provide much of the wealth for railroads like the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern-Santa Fe).
Oh, the fun we can have with geography!
How do you like your iced tea?
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
I saw an amazing atlas of New England dialect variety once, I think it was very large format, maybe 18″ by 24″, and I am wondering if the maps were hand-colored. I can’t remember the library. But sometimes they divided one pronunciation from another, and in other places they divided totally different words…
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This is fun. For about 30 years of so I lived in Baton Rouge, LA and got to know a colleague in Geography, specialist in Southern Cultural Geography named Sam Hilliard. He was forever looking for ways to define the South culturally and geographically. My wife came up with a suggestion that I liked at the time and still like now.
Drive out of the south on every possible road, starting for the sake of argument, in New Orleans, LA. Order coffee at every diner and cafe you pass. Plain black coffee. The first time you are served black coffee in which you can see the bottom of the cup, put a dot on your map. You have left the South. When you’re done, connect up all the dots and you’ll have delineated the South: It’s that area just short of the line you’ve drawn.
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Texas is in the “coke” category, as in (I’m not making this up): “Would you like a coke?”
“Sure, I’d love a coke.”
“What kind of coke you want? Dr. Pepper?”
The generic word “coke” includes all soft drinks here. It’s weird, if you’re not used to it.
Ed, I agree this person, or group, has some real talent. I’d like them to make this available to teachers — and I’d like to see more.
See also my post on the film, “The Civil War in 4 Minutes.” If you can figure out some way to see it, do — it’s playing ONLY at the Lincoln Library and Museum.
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This guy is very talented. I’ve quite seen my share of educational interactives, and reviewed more than a few, and these are quite creative and show a gift that reminds me of Edward Tufte.
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The “pop” versus “soda” line, in my *expert* opinion, sits somewhere in western PA. How western, I am not sure. How far north or south the line goes, I’m not sure either. I’m certain Philadelphians call soda –I’m form central NJ where we definitely call it soda– “soda,” but Erie, PA (located all the way north-west in the little extra piece of PA) calls soda “pop.” (A normal advertisement for beverage stores in Erie states: “Cold Beer. Cold Pop.”) The whole “coke” pseudonym, I’m told, starts just off I-80, maybe in Nebraska. Unfortunately, this source cannot be verified. Good luck with this historic struggle.
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