Geographically, the U.S. states known as the Old South are those in the Southern United States that were among the original Thirteen Colonies. The region term is differentiated from the Deep South and Upper South. From a cultural and social standpoint, the "Old South" is used to describe the rural, agriculturally-based, slavery-reliant economy and society in the Antebellum South, prior to the American Civil War (1861–65), in contrast to the "New South" of the post-Reconstruction Era. Culture The social structure of the Old South was made an important research topic for scholars by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips in the early 20th century. The romanticized image of the "Old South" tells of slavery's plantations, as famously typified in Gone with the Wind, a blockbuster 1936 novel and its adaptation in a 1939 Hollywood film, along with the animated Disney film, Song of the South (1946). Prior to the Civil War, Southerners were never regarded as a distinctive people, separate from the rest of the nation, who possessed their own values and ways of life. During the three decades before the Civil War, popular writers created a stereotype—the plantation legend—that described the South as a land of aristocratic planters, beautiful southern belles, poor white trash, faithful household slaves, and superstitious fieldhands. This image of the South received its most popular expression in 1859, in a song called "Dixie," written by a Northerner named Dan Emmett to enliven shows given by a troupe of blackfaced minstrels on the New York stage. Historians in recent decades have paid much more attention to the enslaved people of the South and the world they made for themselves. To a lesser extent, they have also studied the poor subsistence farmers, known as "yeoman farmers", who owned little property and no slaves. Politics The Old South had a vigorous two-party system, with the Whigs being the strongest in towns, in the business community, and in upscale plantation areas. The slightly more numerous Democrats were strongest among common farmers and poor western districts. After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, black Republicans were largely disenfranchised, leaving the Republican Party a small element based mainly in remote mountain districts within the South. The region was now called "the Solid South", where Southern states would mainly vote Democrat, and lasted through the 1964 presidential election. Religion Historians have explored the religiosity of the Old South in some detail. Before the American Revolution,