NStars project: The southern sample. I.

Here we report on results for 1676 stars in the southern hemisphere observed at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and Steward Observatory. These results include new, precise, homogeneous spectral types, basic physical parameters (including the effective temperature, surface gravity, and metallicity [M/H]), and measures of the chromospheric activity of our program stars.

We include notes on astrophysically interesting stars in this sample, the metallicity distribution of the solar neighborhood, and a table of solar analogs. We also demonstrate that the bimodal nature of the distribution of the chromospheric activity parameter logR'_HK_ depends strongly on the metallicity, and we explore the nature of the "low-metallicity" chromospherically active.