What region is the Southeast?

The Southeast is the region of the United States in the southern South Atlantic and East South Central, generally including the states of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, although exact definitions vary. Sometimes Texas is included in the Southeast or Southwest depending on context, and Maryland and Delaware are sometimes counted as Mid-Atlantic rather than Southeast. The U.S. Census Bureau's South region overlaps with the Southeast and includes 16 states plus the District of Columbia. The total population of the Southeast (12 core states plus parts of others) is about 80 to 100 million depending on definition.

The Southeast was settled by English colonists beginning with Jamestown in 1607 and developed an economy built around plantation agriculture using enslaved African labor. Tobacco anchored the colonial economies of Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. Rice and indigo dominated South Carolina and Georgia. Cotton expanded across the entire Deep South after the cotton gin was invented in 1793. By 1860 about 4 million enslaved African Americans lived in the South, the largest single concentration of unfree labor in the modern world.

The Civil War from 1861 to 1865 was fought largely in the Southeast and ended slavery, although Reconstruction (1865 to 1877) was followed by nearly a century of Jim Crow segregation that lasted until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Major cities include Atlanta (about 6.1 million metro, the largest in the Southeast), Miami (about 6.2 million metro), Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, Nashville, Memphis, Birmingham, New Orleans, Louisville, Richmond, and Norfolk.

Geography ranges from the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains to the Appalachian Mountains in the interior, the Mississippi River and its delta, and the subtropical Florida peninsula. The Everglades occupy southern Florida. The climate is generally subtropical with hot humid summers and mild winters, although Appalachian regions can be cooler. The Southeast experiences hurricanes from June through November, including catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina (August 29, 2005) that devastated the Gulf Coast.

The region's economy historically rested on agriculture but now includes major sectors in finance (Charlotte), aerospace, automotive (Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina), tourism (Florida), petroleum (Louisiana, Texas), and technology (Research Triangle Park in North Carolina). Cultural traditions include diverse cuisines (Cajun, Creole, Soul Food, barbecue, Tex-Mex), music (gospel, blues, jazz, country, rock and roll, hip-hop), and literary traditions (Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor, Morrison, Hurston, Walker). The Southeast is the most populous historical region of the United States and rapidly growing through internal migration and immigration.