Searching for the Sunbelt: Historical Perspectives on a Region (review)

Vol. XXXI, No. 2 105 and "by 1935, . . . the incoming highway, with its ever-present conglomeration of billboards, service stations, and tourist facilities, gradually drained away small towns' economic vitality and slowly redirected the community's civic focus." I can still remember dodging around the statue ofthe Confederate soldier in the center of many a small town, and I suspect that the major impact of highways on their central business districts resulted from the construction of bypasses after the Second World War. The history of filling stations is interesting, as is the story of the development oftourist accommodations, from tourist camps, where "tincan tourists" lived in tents, to tourist cabins, auto courts, and motels, although the book does not really get into the motel era. The book ends before the Interstate highway system had been proposed, but even so, the author has an irritating habit of referring to long-distance through roads as "interstate highways," although he is scrupulous about lowercasing the "i." He compounds this confusion, however, by using the conventional symbol for Interstate highways rather than U.S. highways on the map of U.S. highways on page 133. Apparently he drafted the maps himself because nowhere does he acknowledge the assistance of a cartographer, and he has invented ingenious locations for Indianapolis and Macon on the map on page 57 and for Durham and Charlotte on the map on page 63. A geographical purist might wonder about the location of "the country below Pennsylvania," and there have been times, when I have been plotting data for the 254 counties in Texas, when it might have been a relief if that state really did have only 24 counties. John Fraser Hart, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis , MN 55455. Searching for the Sunbelt: Historical Perspectives on a Region. Raymond A. Mohl, Editor. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. xi and 249 pp., tables, notes, and index. $32.50 cloth (ISBN 0-87049-640-9) Kevin Phillips apparently coined the term "Sun Belt," using it for the first time in his eminently geographical The Emerging Republican Majority , published in 1969. The term became popular in the 1970s as it was associated with the economic and social transformation of a region 106Southeastern Geographer that long had formed the periphery for America's industrial core. Thus, a new vernacular region had been identified, and "Sunbelt" became a part of the geographical lexicon. The term refers loosely to the southern part of the United States, from Florida through Texas to California, and has been used widely by academics and the general public. But does this amorphous area stretching across the southern tier of the United States form a true geographic region? Is it internally homogeneous? How does one define and delineate the Sunbelt? These are the basic questions probed in Searching for the Sunbelt, which comprises ten essays, an introduction, and a concluding epilogue. The collection grew out of a four-day inter-disciplinary research conference organized by Stan Brunn and Peter Müller and held in Miami in November 1985. All of the contributions in the book, however, were written by political scientists and historians (although geographers are represented in the bibliographies). As a result, it includes no map of the Sunbelt region, and this symbolic and literal absence of a geographic perspective weakens the volume. The Introduction and first two essays focus on the theme of the Sunbelt and how the concept developed. The third essay argues that the Sunbelt-Frostbelt competition began in the 1950s as Congress debated the location of the defense industry. The next three essays deal with different aspects of the urban Sunbelt, focusing especially on the political changes that resulted as new groups challenged the old guard in urban governments and won political power. Two essays deal with the changes in the sources of immigrants to the United States and how the Sunbelt has become the focus of entrance and settlement of those especially from Asia and Latin America; one essay looks specifically at Miami as an example of Sunbelt cities that have growing ethnic populations. The only essay not written especially for this volume is Raymond Arsenault 's "The End of the...