Coined by Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in 1969 to describe the
new alloy of conservatism that united voters across the southern rim of
the country, the term Sunbelt has since gained currency in the American
lexicon. By the early 1970s, the region had come to embody economic
growth and an ambitious political culture. With sprawling suburban
landscapes, cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles seemed destined
to sap influence from the Northeast. Corporate entrepreneurialism and a
conservative ethos helped forge the Sunbelt's industrial-labor
relations, military spending, education systems, and neighborhood
development. Unprecedented migration to the region ensured that these
developments worked in concert with sojourners' personal quests for
work, family, community, and leisure. In the resplendent Sunbelt the
nation seemed to glimpse the American Dream remade.
The essays in Sunbelt Rising deploy new analytic tools to explain this
region's dramatic rise. Contributors to the volume study the Sunbelt as
both a physical entity and a cultural invention. They examine the raised
highway, the sprawling prison complex, and the fast-food restaurant as
distinctive material contours of a region. In this same vein they
delineate distinctive Sunbelt models of corporate and government
organization, which came to shape so many aspects of the nation's
political and economic future. Contributors also examine literature,
religion, and civic engagement to illustrate how a particular Sunbelt
cultural sensibility arose that ordered people's lives in a period of
tumultuous change. By exploring the interplay between the Sunbelt as a
structurally defined space and a culturally imagined place, Sunbelt
Rising addresses longstanding debates about region as a category of
analysis.
