This region includes the former slave-holding states of the Confederacy during the Civil War—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Nearby “border” states of Missouri, Kentucky Maryland and West Virginia also share many traits and connections. The South’s defining historical features include social polarization around race and class, intense political campaigns defending these interests, a stratified rural agricultural base and torturous cultural debates over these features, in the South and in confrontation with the rest of the nation. The South remains paradoxical in the very salience of its positive and negative images—friendly yet embittered, or genteel but ignorant and provincial. Such stereotypes permeated coverage of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as they had in the civil rights campaigns, which fundamentally changed the Solid South.

Change is a fundamental feature of modern Southern contradictions. In the 1930s, this area, and its black and white population, was labeled the number one economic problem in America, even while romanticized in movies like Gone With the Wind (1939), which continued to shape visions of Southern history worldwide. Abandoned by many African Americans as a hell of slavery and segregation, its whites expressed both guilt and defiance in dealing with the rest of the nation. After the Second World War, the South was segregated, fundamentalist, rural, Democrat and poor, yet it also held an aura of mystery aristocratic culture and verdant passions. By the 1990s, the South was generally and visibly integrated, marked by Sunbelt development, diverse and Republican— without totally belying or erasing its earlier lives and reputation.

Economic development had already begun to change the South in the 1930s and 1940s, with the work of the WPA and the Tennessee Valley Authority, controlling flooding and generating power throughout the upper South. Other stimuli to growth came from manufacturers moving production to non-union and cheap-wage states, a pattern still present in exploitative industries like poultry and clothing. Military development also generated continuing investment in the South, whose Congress members and citizens stayed committed to the armed forces even in periods of American doubt like the Vietnam War. The South remains covered by military bases and suppliers to this day.

Agriculture, forced into modernization by the exodus of cheap, controllable labor, continued as an economic base. While King Cotton never recovered its pre-eminence after turn of the nineteenth century boll weevil infestations, tobacco, sugar, fruits and vegetables, meats and fish have all contributed to state and local economies.

In the 1950s, however, the issues were less economic than social and political, as disfranchised blacks across the South demanded equal rights of participation within their societies. Segregation, for decades, had denied citizens the vote, job opportunities, schools and even access to stores, restaurants and bathrooms on the basis of race. Bloody campaigns to gain these rights tore across rural areas, small towns and the cities of the South. Figures such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lillian Smith emerged as consciences not only for the region but for the nation which had accommodated to the oppression of so many citizens. Meanwhile, segregationist politicians like George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond charted a course which broke the South from the New Deal Democrats towards a conservative union with Republicans which became evident in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 triumphs there against Lyndon Johnson, a Texan identified with civil rights.

Slow resolutions of decades of injustice came with development as well as constitutional revindication. In the 1970s, as protest tore across America’s industrial cities, a new South beckoned with investment opportunities and images of leisure in a lush climate (aided by widespread air-conditioning). Florida, already a tourism center, boomed into the fourth-largest state in the country with retirees and coastal development; all Southern states except Arkansas and Tennessee have coasts which saw massive development into the 1990s. Yet the gaps between plutocratic Palm Beach and Florida’s inland agricultural towns like Belle Glade still speak of both human and environmental exploitation. Texas, whose trajectory also differs from the rest of the South, burgeoned with oil and gas in boom-and-bust metropoles like Houston and Dallas, while facing deep divisions between Latino populations, old and new, and Anglo settlers and immigrants. Meanwhile, the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi Delta remained mired in poverty as mines closed and small farms failed to compete—even when new resort developments would later spring up nearby By the 1980s, new capitals had emerged. Atlanta took command of air, government offices and ultimately media with Ted Turner. Charlotte, NC, however, challenged Atlanta’s control of finance through the aggressive national mergers of many North Carolina banks, while Miami and Houston evoked a more global South with ties to Latin America and the Caribbean. Nashville, in music, Orlando, with Disneyworld development, and New Orleans, in everything, also blend old and new South, where tourists come to experience, buy and even resettle in areas scorned only decades before.

Development has not erased divisions, as blacks continue to fight for equal funding and access as well as political representation across the South. Conservative national politicians and judges may often seem to be more of an enemy than local leaders.

Meanwhile, the area that produced almost all modern Democratic presidents—Johnson (who balanced Massachusett’s young, liberal JFK), Carter (Georgia) and both Clinton (Arkansas) and his VP Gore (Tennessee)—has increasingly voted Republican in Congress and the statehouse. In 1996 the Democratic president and vicepresident and the Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, of Georgia, and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, of Mississippi, were all Southerners, yet polarized by party and, to some extent, ideology. The 2000 elections has seen Southerners heading the tickets for both parties. Ironically inroads by blacks, women and other minorities have been more notable in urban politics and local elections.

Other cultural features of the South are also in flux. The isolation of underdevelopment has given way to national and international migrations. Yuppies and “twentysomethings” are as much a feature of the North Carolina research triangle as the Houston suburbs. In cities, new Asian and Caribbean communities have also appeared, often in the suburbs.

The religious panorama of the South, identified with Bible belt preachers in both white and black evangelical traditions, was always more complex, including elite Episcopalians and urban Catholics and Jews. Buddhism, Islam and Santería have complicated this vision, but 1990s Southern spiritualities also encompass large, secular populations for whom the gods and guilt of the South no longer have the same meanings.

Education has also changed. Centuries of segregated education gave way to whiteflight academies and de facto divisions, which the South now shares with public education nationwide. Although the College of William and Mary in Virginia, is one of the country’s oldest schools, Southern universities were once more known for sports and gentlemanly finishing than academics. While the Southeastern Conference remains a powerhouse in football and basketball—highly integrated sports—other schools like Duke, University of North Carolina, Vanderbilt, Tulane, Georgia Tech and Emory have increased national prestige as well.

The culture of the South, through all of these changes, has also demanded reflection— the drive, as a Faulkner character put it, to “tell about the South.” Authors including Faulkner, Eudora Welty Maya Angelou, Reynolds Price, James Agee, Alice Walker, Tennessee Williams and Ralph McGill have found inspiration and dilemmas in their region. John Grisham and Anne Rice have dominated popular fiction, exploring the darkness of the South as well as its changes. Southern musical traditions—blues, Cajun, countrywestern, gospel, jazz, ragtime and tejana—have infused American culture in voices from Mahalia Jackson to Elvis Presley.

In movies and television, however, images produced outside the South have changed much more slowly The “guilty” South has haunted classic movies like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Alternate visions of tortured struggle (Wise Blood, 1979, based on Flannery O’Connor’s religious novel; or the labor panorama of Harlan County, USA, 1976) and complicated corruption (Robert Altman’s Nashville, 1975) exist alongside creative communities of minorities and women (Julie Dash’s exquisite Daughters of the Dust, 1989; Hollywood’s The Color Purple, 1985). Television has changed even more slowly finally abandoning the bucolic comedy of the Andy Griffith Show for sophisticated and sardonic women in Designing Women.

Facing the twenty-first century the South and its inhabitants still constitute one of the most strongly marked regions of the United States. Yet, rapid changes in the area in the last five decades and its complexity today also mark the South as quintessentially American. The South shares the same dilemmas, development and population in a manner scarcely imaginable before the Second World War. Images and realities, division and identity are continually reshaped against a history perhaps more distant yet hardly escaped.