“Texas is predominantly regarded, culturally rather than geographically, as a Southern state.”

It divides the South into two regions, splitting Texas off from the rest of the Southeast, and splits the Midwest off from the rest of the North, divided into discontinuous countryside/coastal regions, rather than contiguous cultural regions.

Not surprisingly, Texas (22nd most southern) ranked very low on our index of political southernness. Our data suggest that Black and Black (2002, 88) are correct that Texas is the region's least southern state. … Texas looks fairly southern based on public opinion, but with the addition of policy outcomes Texas ranks much lower on our scale.

And they started doing so as a way of distancing themselves from the late unpleasantness of the 1860’s and 1870’s. Defeat, military occupation, Jim Crow and lynching, and all of those unpleasant things that are very much a part of Texas history as a Southern state, were things that a lot of Texans would probably just as soon not talk about a lot. … So Texas’’s politicians, educators, and ad-men went to work, Cantrell says, and have since all but totally recast the very ideal of what it means to be a Texan. … At the same time, Texans came to view themselves more Western than Southern. Or a mixture of both. Or neither.

Arkansas (05) Louisiana (22) Oklahoma (40) Texas (48) Division 7: West South Central … Region 3: South

The South region includes the South Atlantic division: Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia; the East South Central division: Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee; and the West South Central division: Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas.

The Texas State Historical Association voted in 1912 to change the name of its journal to the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. … This name change placed the journal solidly in the mainstream of a powerful intellectual force then beginning to sweep through academic circles across the United States. This movement eventually became known as regionalism.

East Texas feels very much like the westernmost part of the South, but not much at all like the West or the Southwest, which bolsters the age-old argument that Texas is neither Southern nor Western, but rather its own thing—wholly Texan.

However—partly due to its membership in the Confederacy and history as part of the Solid South—and the fact much of the state lies within the Bible Belt—it is usually considered more of a Southern than Western state.

As a state with a “complex” and “complicated” relationship with the South (Johnstone 1999), Texas may be included in the South, but is often grouped with the West or labelled as its own region (Lance 1999, Niedzielski and Preston 1999, Preston 1986).

The culture of Texas has been influenced by migration from the American North and West, differing from that of its eastern neighbors in the Deep South. … The United States Census Bureau places Texas in the Southern United States.

Texas is in the South Central United States of America, and is considered to form part of the U.S. South and also part of the U.S. Southwest. … The size of Texas prohibits easy categorization of the entire state wholly in any recognized region of the United States, and even cultural diversity among regions of the state makes it difficult to treat Texas as a region in its own right.

A survey conducted by social geographers in 2010 selected thirteen states as the cultural South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. The Council of State Governments, an organization for communication and coordination between states, includes the same thirteen states as well as Texas and Missouri in its South regional office.

Anglo-Texas women typically do not think of themselves as Southerners, but many can use speech forms that came to Texas from the American South.

But there are people who claim that we ARE definitely a part of “The South,” and that it’s impossible to deny. … To me, the fact that this is even up for debate sort of proves that a lot of folks just see Texas as something different culturally than other Southern states – there’s not similar disagreement about the “Southern-ness” of say, Alabama or Mississippi. … And that in a nutshell is why I don’t think it is any longer accurate to include Texas as part of “The South.”

Even though culturally and politically Texas is referred to the South, geographically it’s a little questionable.

But Texas is harder to pin down to a specific set of characteristics. Some, like the usage of ma’am and sir, make it a distinctly Southern state. Other elements, like its Wild West frontier, are more akin to the Southwest.