“Fireworking Down South” by Brooks Blevins in Southern Cultures (Spring 2004) Journals Dept., Univ. of North Carolina Press, P.O. Box 2288, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27515–2288.

“There is nothing inherently southern about fireworks—they were, after all, invented by the Chinese some 1,200 years ago,” writes Blevins, a professor of regional studies at Lyon College in Arkansas. But fireworks have had a special appeal for southerners ever since the end of the Civil War. Unwilling to celebrate the “Yankee holiday” of Inde­pendence Day, southerners chose instead to shoot off their fireworks during the Christmas season—a tradition that lingers still in parts of the Deep South. The region has pretty much refused to yield to the American Medical Association’s campaign to ban fireworks. They’re legal—and loosely regulated—in two-thirds of the southern states, where laws allow citizens to ignite big, bright, and dangerous displays in the comfort of their own backyards: “Among the litany of rights cherished in the South is the right to endanger oneself and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity.”

But fireworks, says Blevins, don’t appeal only to “off-kilter, small-town characters” who’ve memorized “instructions for building a bomb using only duct tape and a box of sparklers.” Their attraction is widespread. In 2002, the pyrotechnics industry earned more than $725 million, most of it on the 3rd and 4th of July, when 90 percent of sales take place—some, no doubt, above the Mason-Dixon line, but the majority below.

Blevins believes that the pyrotechnics industry has its roots in Jeffersonian ideals: Fireworks in the South are “populist and Protestant—taking the goods, and the dangers, directly to the people, no interceders needed.” At the fireworks stand, many southerners probably think more of the Dixie Thunder, the Battle of New Orleans, the Nuclear Melt­down, the Cape Canaveral, and the Enduring Freedom than they do the Founding Fathers. Still, for them the smell of burnt saltpeter and the roar and rumble of the Dixie Thunder—whether in July or December—are the peculiar sensations of home.