Where do American arguments about regions and regional identity come from? This is a question we seldom ask ourselves, because the answer seems so apparent. Regions with distinctive climates, geographies, cultures, and histories are simply there and they provide the framework for understanding that we are what has happened to us, and what we can look forward to. Maps of the United States, cartographic icons of nationhood, draw our attention outward, across the continent, away from the centers of population and power and toward the different places we all come from. Thinking ourselves across space, we think ourselves slow in time, imaginatively returning to certain places in an idealized past.
