What are we actually talking about when we talk about the New South, a term bandied about with the same frequency (and often the same conceit) with which people label Charleston “quietly progressive”? It can be hard to define and seems to really depend on who you ask. In a companion video to the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art’s upcoming photographic exhibit Southbound: Photographs of and About the New South, folklorist William Ferris reminds us that “each generation has claimed to be the New South.”

As a point of fact, the term was coined in the 1880s by journalist Henry W. O’Grady. From its inception, it was meant to describe the emerging and restructured social, economic, and political order of the South after the Civil War. Popularly, it is often used to describe specific parts of the South that more closely resemble other urban and progressive centers of the country. For photographer and native of Montgomery, Ala., Andy Scott, for example, the New South always had a very specific connotation: “Growing up in Alabama, which is not the New South in my mind, it meant Dallas, Charlotte, and Atlanta … cities that seemed to be most like the rest of the country. Progressive socially, and in terms of business engagement.”