Notes & Comments

Thinking About Regions

Gregory Wilson, University of Akron

Publication Director, Northeast Ohio Journal of History

The Northeast Ohio Journal of History bills itself as a regional enterprise.  However, this masks the many complexities involved in defining a region.  Of course, the concept of a region is a human creation, an effort to simplify discussions of disparate events, or to generalize about certain trends, issues, and events noticed in various local or state locations.  Within the history of the United States, writers have made great and frequent use of regions: the West, the Great Lakes, Appalachia, the Northwest, the Great Plains, the South and so on.  By its nature, defining a region means creating an entity that is unique in some fashion, different from other places around it according to some combination of cultural, economic, environmental, political, or social attributes.  Regional boundaries are fluid, flexible, and porous and thus it is a matter of debate as to what is or is not part of a region.  For example, the South usually refers to the 11 states that seceded in 1861; yet at times, historians have expanded this to include West Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland and Oklahoma.  Including 11 makes the South a region defined politically by secession, but including 4 others means historians must go beyond political categories and search for other attributes that bind together people and places.  In the case of the South, what makes the 4 others "southern"?  The former presence of slavery?  Accents and words in the language? Food and folkways?  Geographic features?  Economic data?  Again, there are multiple factors at work in defining places as regions.

Regionalism layers over other factors historians use to analyze societies, such as class, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, age, or disability.  Within states, or within counties, or within towns, people regularly create regional distinctions based on compass points (the "East Side", "Southern California") that imply unique cultural forms, economic activities, or political beliefs.  Regions celebrate difference over unity.  Sometimes we get trapped within the contradictions inherent in working with regions.  Writers on Appalachia, for example, have fought against attempts to essentialize the people there as "hardy mountain folk," different and interesting because of their peculiar accents and fondness for moonshine.  Appalachians, they argue, are no different than others.  Writers defend the differences between Appalachian people, citing folkways and traditions as worth preserving and defending from mass consumer culture.  Often, too, writers will attack "outsiders" as removing wealth in the form of timber and coal from the common people of Appalachia.  This is not to defend nor criticize any of these views, but merely to point out that historians can not easily escape the contradictions inherent in using regions as places of analysis.

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