An academic look at 'Southeast'

Is the "Southeast" a Yankee creation?

In a noted essay in the Charlotte Observer in the early 1980s, editor Lew Powell suggested that the use of the term "Southeastern" was an attempt by Northern transplants to re-identify their new surroundings.

Now retired UNC-Chapel Hill professor John Shelton Reed responded to the article in a piece (under the pseudonym J.R. Vanover) for Southern Partisan magazine that attacked the term as a historical dodge (quoted here):

... I am afraid that, increasingly, Southeast is not being used to designate a part of the South, the eastern counterpart of the Southwest. Rather it refers to a major region of the United States — a counterpart to, say, the Northeast. There is a disturbing tendency in these parts to say and to write and even, God help us, to think Southeastern, where formerly we would have said and written and thought Southern.

In a scholarly paper in 1990, Reed and two co-authors found that use of the terms "the South" and "Dixie" had dropped in city phone books over the past two decades.