This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.It is a truth universally acknowledged that the southerner is the most mannerly person in America. Before any Yanks get defensive, I want to clarify that this does not necessarily make them the kindest group in America. As a young child in Tennessee, I learned that a “Bless your heart” to one’s face paired particularly well with a cutting remark behind closed doors. I also learned that etiquette was a pesky but persistent thing: Anytime I replied to my father with a curt “yes,” he’d look at me sideways and say, “Yes, what?” I’d sigh. “Yes sir.”My father is a seventh-generation Kentuckian, and my mother’s family has lived in the South since the 18th century. Growing up, I knew that there was a regalia to the southerner’s manners that might come as a surprise to those who cast the region as unrefined. Men are to hold doors for their dates and give up their seats to women on the bus. In some spaces, they will still stand when a lady enters or exits the room. There are also the more casual types of manners. When you pass any stranger on the street, you say, “Howdy,” or, “How are you?” You wave at pedestrians you drive by in your truck. You let neighbors borrow an egg or a cup of sugar without any expectation of repayment. Even as the identity of the South evolves, and more young people lose certain traits that are identifiably southern, manners remain one of the region’s most distinctive and steadfast qualities.The region’s attitudes toward hospitality are a natural outgrowth of these broader social graces. In the South, people like to emphasize that anyone’s cousin’s neighbor’s friend will be welcome in your home. As Walter H. Page described in The Atlantic in 1881, if a stranger comes “with a letter of introduction from some of their old friends, or if he happen to be connected, however distantly, with an old family known to them, he will at once be taken into their homes, and he will receive every hospitality.” This kindness has its limits, however. “The South is famous for its courtesy, but the highly refined concept of honor that largely produced its manners has also helped to make the region the most violent in the country,” Benjamin Schwarz noted in a 1997 Atlantic essay. “As the old saying goes, a southerner is gracious and friendly until he is mad enough to kill you.”Although plenty of southerners are motivated to adhere to codes of etiquette by a sense of selflessness and responsibility, the manners that they are so careful to keep are also an effort to protect their reputation. And a well-mannered person isn’t necessarily a mild-mannered person. One 1996 study compared the behaviors of white male University of Michigan students who grew up in the North with those who grew up in the South: When a man bumped into a student and called him an asshole, the students raised in the South were more likely to think that their masculine reputation was threatened and respond aggressively.You also cannot tell the story of southern manners without telling the story of Black southerners—specifically, the story of their enslavement and its lingering effects. “A Southerner of the upper class delighted in saying that he was taught his manners by his ‘Black Mammy,’” Jessie W. Parkhurst, the then-dean of women at the Tuskegee Institute, wrote in 1938. Many enslaved women who worked domestic roles were made to care for white children. Beginning in the antebellum era, they were caricatured as grateful and devoted caregivers, even as they were being underpaid and overworked. Long after the abolition of slavery, many white southerners, including my father, who was born into the first breaths of the civil-rights movement, were still raised by Black nannies. (This is true outside the South as well—the majority of domestic workers in America today are women of color.) My father, like many other white southerners, learned most of his manners from the nanny with whom he spent so many hours of his childhood.The courtesies shown in the region have long been “the product of the fusion of black and white attitudes,” Schwarz noted in his essay. But politeness was often forced on Black southerners because their lives depended on it: As recently as decades ago, any perceived violations of etiquette, including simply making eye contact with white people, could provoke brutal beatings and lynchings. And Black contributions to manners were rarely given equal import. After slavery was outlawed, Black women had limited employment prospects in the Jim Crow era and the years after, and they were usually severely underpaid.Today, the extent to which southerners are mannerly has evolved, as all things do. Some southerners lament what they see as a recent loss to their distinctive approach to etiquette, but this was already the case in 1897, when W. P. Trent wrote in this magazine, “We have seen that the Southerner’s basis of character is a fine one, and that he is becoming, year by year, more thoroughly nationalized.” He explained that “external manners have undoubtedly changed: there is now less suavity, less punctiliousness, less attention to small details, than of old; but this was true of the South of 1860 as compared with that of 1760, and means nothing but progress in the direction of greater freedom and individuality in conformity with the rest of the world.”Part of the reason could be that more people are moving to the South. In January, I wrote about the disappearing southern drawl, another aspect of the region’s culture that is noticeably changing. I noted that, according to the U.S. census, the South gained more residents than all other regions combined from 2023 to 2024. I also found that the proliferation of the internet has undeniably altered southern culture; young kids are exposed to different behaviors on social media, and their role models aren’t just nannies or teachers or parents—they now come in the form of content creators and online friends.These factors may be driving the shift in southern manners writ large. I’ve observed a generational difference even in my own family. My sisters still live in Tennessee, and I live in New York City, but none of us spends our days quite like our mother. She will make warm conversation with strangers whenever she possibly can. Living in a big city can often hurry me out of this habit. She’ll fill your plate a second or third time despite your saying you couldn’t possibly have another bite. I offer my guests a glass of wine and whatever nonperishable snack they can scavenge from the pantry. She will listen to a story she has heard hundreds of times with the enthusiasm of it being its first telling.My sisters and I don’t have this same patience. But time spent with my mother, who puts hours of care and kindness into daily interactions, always reminds me of the goodness to be found in doing the mannerly thing—in being inquisitive, leaving a kind note, shouting “How are ya?” at the neighbor, knowing that it may turn into a two-hour conversation. Sometimes these niceties are more than just nice. In an age of constant hurry, they’re also an excuse to slow down, if only for a moment.