Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Southern United States is one of the four census regions of the US, including sixteen states and the District of Columbia. It is a region where the humid subtropical climate nurtures both the most fertile cotton fields in history and the most devastating droughts of the Dust Bowl, creating a landscape of extreme contrasts.
The first well-dated evidence of human occupation in the Southern United States dates back to 9500 BC, when Paleo-Indians roamed the land as hunter-gatherers. The first region to be settled by Europeans was Tidewater, containing the low-lying plains of southeast Virginia, northeastern North Carolina, southern Maryland, and the Chesapeake Bay, with immigration beginning in 1607 and continuing until the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775.
After Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican president in 1860, seven cotton states declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America before Lincoln was inaugurated. The Confederate States of America moved its capital to Richmond, Virginia, and the war broke out when Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered his troops to open fire on Fort Sumter in April 1861.
By 1900, Dallas had a population of more than 42,000, which more than doubled to over 92,000 a decade later. Dallas was the harnessmaking capital of the world and a center of other manufacturing, and in 1907 it built the Praetorian Building, fifteen storeys tall and the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi.
The first major oil well in the South was drilled at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas, on the morning of the 10th of January 1901. Other oil fields were later discovered nearby in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and under the Gulf of Mexico, permanently transforming the economy of the West South Central states.
In 2021, nine out of the ten states with the highest poverty rates were in the South. In 2023 all five states with the lowest GDP per capita were in the South: Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, and South Carolina.