It won’t shock readers of Southern Cultures to learn that when northerners begin to study the South, they bring along what we’ll just agree to call misconceptions. I know this firsthand because I remember a few choice and painful moments in my own early apprenticeship as a South-watcher. Born and raised in a suburb of Boston, educated in eastern schools, I approached my first graduate-school research trip to the South in 1990 with a mixture of fear and exotic expectation, as though my upcoming week in Wilmington, North Carolina, were a trek to Machu Picchu during the heyday of the Shining Path. I remember finalizing hotel arrangements over the phone and then declaring with some awe, “They have speed-dial!” The fellow student to whom this discovery was reported, a Missourian, fixed me with a disdainful glare and reminded me what I’d forgotten: “North Carolina is in the United States.”