“You can almost always start an argument about southern unity versus diversity.”

Is the South one place or many? Agreement is hard to find on this old chestnut, and you can almost always start an argument about southern unity versus diversity. On the diversity side, Chapel Hill sociologist Rupert Vance pointed out rather ponderously back in 1932 that the South “holds within its bounds many physiographic areas and many human regions,” and insisted that “the physical regions are thus correlated with forms of economy, of social organization—in short, of culture.” As a result, Vance concluded, “the South is not one region but many,” and went on to catalogue them all in his celebrated Human Geography of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 1932).