"All One Thing or All the Other"

"I'm a fifth-generation Southerner, though long expatriated, and I know the wounded indignation with which the folks back home react to any suggestion that the South is no longer—or maybe never was—an entirely separate region. What about our hound dogs, our verandas, our charm, our football worship, our slow-moving 'way of life'? Outsiders who have visited the South, going back to Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted or even further, have usually agreed with the natives about the South's distinctiveness, though they have often seen it as something to condemn, not admire. How can the South be so American if it feels (and smells, and sounds, and looks) so Southern?"

Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker reviews recent books about the South.