Still, there are differences between places and people in Virginia today. If you're in a Hardees in South Boston, notice the iced tea - odds are, it will be sweetened, unlike the iced tea in the Hardees at Fredericksburg. Manassas students debate whether the University of Virginia can beat Virginia Tech in football this year - but Danville students may follow the athletic successes of competing schools in North Carolina. There are excellent Japanese restaurants in Roanoke and Garrison Keillor has presented Prairie Home Companion shows in the Roanoke coliseum, but a Middleburg or McLean address will still carry far more social cachet (except in the West End of Richmond, where your family name may carry more weight than even your bank account).

If you have a nostalgic, First Family of Virginia (FFV) perspective, you can say there's Northern Virginia and then there's "real Virginia." Typically, folks drawing this line are long-term residents who consider Northern Virginia to be an alien entity, "occupied" by Northerners and people with no family ties to Virginia.

If you're less emotional about defining the regions of Virginia, you can can segment Virginia into far more regions.

Hampton Roads can be split into the Eastern Shore, Gloucester, Newport News/Hampton, Suffolk/Chesapeake, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach. If you're doing direct mail advertising, you'll use Zip Codes to split down further to distinct neighborhoods. If you're a politician, you'll split down to precincts - remember, all politics is local. And if you're a Census enumerator, you'll try to find every single person in your Census block.

The boundaries of these regions of Virginia are permeable to migration of people and information. The current boundaries are poorly-defined, subject to debate, and perhaps likely to be outdated within a few decades. Virginia's political boundaries have also been subject to change. The colonial claims to the Forks of the Ohio (Pittsburgh area) were dropped in the 1760's. The Commonwealth of Virginia claims to the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois...) were relinquished in the 1780's. Kentucky became a separate state in the 1790's, and in the 1860's the western 33 counties of Virginia split off to become West Virginia.

• Development of Linear Cities
• Different Ways to Classify Virginia's Current Regions
• How the Fall Line Shaped Powhatan's Empire
• How the Fall Line Shaped Colonial Settlement in Virginia
• How Will the Internet Change the Current Regions?
• Initial Urban Centers in Colonial Times
• Is Virginia a "Southern" State Now?
• Regions of Virginia Defined by Watershed Boundaries

• Role of Blue Ridge
• Role of Coal
• Urban Areas of Virginia
• What Determines the Boundaries of a Region in Virginia?
• How Virginia Split Into "East" and West Virginia (But With Only Three Shenandoah Valley Counties, and Without Southwest Virginia)