Southern Hospitality versus Yankee: Levine Museum of the New South

Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte

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:

Cartoon at Levine Museum

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