The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South— is an area in the southeastern and south-central United States. The region is known for its distinct culture and history, having developed its own customs, musical styles and varied cuisines that have helped distinguish it from the rest of the United States. The South owes its unique heritage to a variety of sources, including Native Americans, early European settlements of Spanish, English, German, French, Scots-Irish and Scottish importation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, historic dependence on slave labor, presence of a large proportion of African Americans in the population, and the aftermath of the Confederacy after the Civil War.

Historically, the South relied heavily on agriculture but has become more industrialized and urban since the last few decades of the 20th century, attracting national and international migrants. The American South is now among the fastest-growing areas in the United States. While there has been rapid economic growth, every Southern state with the exceptions of Maryland, Virginia and Florida has a higher poverty rate than the American average. Poverty is especially prevalent in rural areas.^{[citation needed]} Sociological research has indicated that Southern collective identity stems from political, demographic and cultural distinctiveness. Studies have shown that Southerners are more conservative than non-Southerners in several areas, including religion, morality, international relations and race relations. This is evident during presidential elections and in religious attendance figures.

Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club.

After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from a number of schools and eventually spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, he was able to secure a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature.

He first came to public attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also included Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and took the role of Jeeves (with Laurie playing Wooster) in Jeeves and Wooster.

As an actor, Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the BBC television series Blackadder, starred as the title character Peter Kingdom in the ITV series Kingdom, has a recurring guest role as Dr. Gordon Wyatt on the Fox crime series Bones and appeared as rogue TV host Gordon Deitrich in the dystopian thriller V For Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series including the 2008 television series Stephen Fry in America, which saw him travelling across all 50 US states. Since 2003 he has been the host of the quiz show QI.

Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was an American historian and novelist who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a massive, three-volume history of the war. With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote was relatively unknown to the general public for most of his life until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives."

Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the son of Shelby Dade Foote and his wife Lillian Rosenstock. Foote's paternal grandfather, a planter, had gambled away most of his fortune and assets. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna. Foote was raised in his father's and maternal grandmother's Episcopal denomination of Christianity. As his father advanced through the executive ranks of Armour and Company, the family lived in Greenville, Jackson, and Vicksburg, Mississippi, as well as Pensacola, Florida and Mobile, Alabama. Foote's father died in Mobile when Foote was five years old; he and his mother moved back to Greenville. Foote was an only child, and his mother never remarried. When Foote was 15 years old, Walker Percy and his brothers LeRoy and Phinize Percy moved to Greenville to live with their uncle — attorney, poet, and novelist William Alexander Percy — after the death of their parents. Foote began a lifelong fraternal and literary relationship with Walker; each had great influence on the other's writing.

William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career. He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his childhood, and Holly Springs/Marshall County.

Faulkner is one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Juan Manuel Magán González (born 30 September 1978) is a Spanish producer, singer, remixer and DJ of electronic music, especially House, R&B, Dancehall and Hip-Hop, recognized internationally for his contributions to the "Electro Latino" category of music.

As a remixer, he has worked with the following artists, among others: Selena, Don Omar, Paulina Rubio, Juanes, Nelly Furtado, Dulce María, MJ, Pitbull, Michael Gray, Milk & Sugar, Bob Sinclar, Gary Nesta Pine, Ian Oliver, Azzido da Bass, Jerry Ropero, E Smoove, Barbara Muñoz, Pier Bucci and INNA

His DJ sets have been played in many of the biggest and most important cities of the world: Barcelona, Ibiza, Madrid, Paris, Miami, Geneva, San Francisco, Rabat, Manila, Dubai, Lisbon, Oporto, Marseille, Lausane, Munich, Milan, Mexico City, Singapore, Panama, Cali, Quito, Bucharest, Las Vegas, Santo Domingo, El Salvador and a long list of others.

His early discography includes "Suave", created with Marcos Rodriguez, which included the greatest electronic and Latin successes of the time on a global level: "Suck My - Suave", "Bora Bora", "Que levante la mano mi gente", "El Globo", "El otro soy yo", "Loco", "Merenguito" were all supported by the most influential DJs and in style in the global House scene, and on top of the official sales list in Spain and on the global level has become the second in the world in total digital sales by Beatport with "Bora Bora".