Southern Hospitality versus Yankee: Levine Museum of the New South

I popped into the Levine Museum of the New South last week.

It’s in Charlotte, and as I walked around downtown before my museum visit, the city felt so new that it was hard for me to imagine it had much history at all.  I had the sense that the city had sprung whole out of a subdivision.

The Levine Museum set me straight, detailing the history of Charlotte since the Civil War in its premier and permanent exhibit, Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers .

When you get into the skyscraper era, the exhibit makes the point that the New South is not culturally homogenous — all sorts of people live there, from many countries and even from that place that can feel like another country, the north.

But just when I was feeling sort of kumbaya, I was reminded that that proximity, and even residency, cannot eliminate all differences: