Yankeeland
A Technician article discussed the team's upcoming trip into "Yankeeland" to compete against Boston College.
In his discussion of Southern identity, historian James C. Cobb observes that the 1920s and 1930s saw some Southerners devote an increasing amount of attention to improving the region’s institutions of higher education. Significantly, he illustrates how these efforts created and reinforced different understandings of Southern identity. Cobb argues that efforts to improve higher education in a society often result in “a schism between those who believe their country can benefit most by following the example of more ostensibly advanced societies and those who think it is better to emphasize and preserve the innate strengths of their own way of life.” He shows that these different ways of thinking both played an important role in the South during the first half of the twentieth century. Some saw improving the region’s colleges and universities as one way “to modernize the South’s economy and institutions through a scientific, planned effort” that emulated Northern practices. Others, however, emphasized inherent differences between the two regions and promoted the importance of maintaining a distinctly Southern way of life.
In the 1930s at North Carolina State College, football clearly served both purposes. Competition with Northern teams served to strengthen the connections some Southerners felt with the rest of the country and proved that Southerners could master a Northern sport. However, competing with Northern schools was also a way for Southerners to affirm a separate sense of collective identity. For instance, an article in the Technician, NC State’s student newspaper, described the football team’s upcoming game against Boston College by declaring that “the Wolfpack will be out to avenge itself for the beating it took at the hands of Manhattan on its last trip into ‘Yankeeland.” Boston College and Manhattan were two distinct institutions that might have had little in common, but the author clearly saw both as representatives of the North. Defeating one would at least partially make up for losing to the other.