Doesn’t the keyword “region” self-evidently denote a discrete place? Certainly, the first definition in the American Heritage Dictionary—a region is “a large, usually continuous segment of a surface or space”—indicates as much. This usage of the term presumes that regions are self-contained places—generally, that they are effects of natural geography. As such, it fosters a paradox within the term “region” and its variants by making invisible the myriad ways in which human processes, particularly those associated with modernization, nation formation, and globalization, create “places” that appear to preexist or be peripheral to these very processes. The usage of the keyword “region” to reference a homogenous local place prevailed for almost a century and a half, and it continues to have traction. The assumption that regions of the United States are geographically, culturally, and demographically fixed was institutionalized by the 1880s, when areas that had been regarded as “sections” of a federated nation, including New England, the South, and more recently incorporated places like the Southwest, were integrated into the model of a unified, industrial-capitalist, democratic nation that contained several discrete regions. This assumption was initially sustained by the postbellum cultural movement known as regionalism or local color, which included New...