Short answers, pulled from the story.
The U.S. Census Bureau defines the South as sixteen states and the District of Columbia, split into three divisions. The South Atlantic group includes Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. The East South Central group includes Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, and the West South Central group includes Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.
Dixie is a nickname applied to the Southern U.S. region, most commonly associated with the eleven former Confederate States. The South also goes by the Southland, Dixieland, the American South, or simply the South.
Slavery shaped the South's economy from the early 1600s to the mid-1800s, first through tobacco cultivation in Virginia and then through cotton after 1800. From the 1820s through the 1850s, more than one million enslaved Africans were transported to the Deep South in a forced migration. Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown wrote that slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.
The Confederacy suffered 95,000 soldiers killed in action and 165,000 who died of disease, a total of 260,000, out of a white Southern population of around 5.5 million. Based on 1860 census figures, about 18% of white Southern males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, compared with 6% in the North.
Most Black Americans in the former Confederacy and Oklahoma could not vote until 1965, after passage of the Voting Rights Act and federal enforcement. From 1890 to 1908, ten of the eleven former Confederate states plus Oklahoma had passed disenfranchising constitutions using poll taxes, residency requirements and literacy tests.
World War II broke the South's economic backwardness, with 40% of new military installation spending going to the region and per capita income jumping 140% from 1940 to 1945. Growth then accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s into autos, telecommunications, technology, banking and aviation, and by the 2000 census the South led the nation in population growth.
The Bible Belt is the area of high Protestant church attendance, especially evangelical churches such as the Southern Baptist Convention, that covers almost all of the South. Evangelical Protestantism has dominated the region since the early 1800s as a result of the Second Great Awakening, and by 1900 the Southern Baptist Convention was the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.