The Irreducibility of the County in the South and America, Past and Present.

In the United States county government has remained powerful since before the Revolution, via legal or extralegal arrangements. Even during the nineteenth-century debate over nationalism versus states' rights, they were the governmental power that had the most direct impact on American lives, especially in the South. Challenges to constitutional guarantees of equal protection often come about on the county level. Neoliberal economics and suburbanization have renewed the scope of county government in some places, often in ways that echo the nineteenth century. Although most historians have shown little interest in them, counties could provide them with a framing device for dissecting little-studied sectors of American society and an escape from the problems inherent to American exceptionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]