By 1700, roughly 70 percent of West Jersey's population were Quakers of English or Irish origin. Their influence - peace, equality, integrity, a habit of quiet stubbornness - shaped the region's institutions in ways that still echo. Slavery was significantly less extensive in South Jersey than in the rest of the state. By 1810, the South Jersey enslaved population had dwindled to 328, while the rest of New Jersey held 10,532. The region became a way station on the Underground Railroad. William Still, born in Burlington County in 1821, kept the meticulous written records of escaped enslaved people that earned him the title father of the Underground Railroad. The Quakers as a denomination opposed the American Revolution on grounds of nonviolence; their members were forbidden to support local militias. But several Presbyterian preachers in the same counties - John Brainerd among them - took military commissions and urged enlistment. The contradictions in South Jersey's founding theology have always lived comfortably side by side.

At the geographic heart of South Jersey lies one of the more improbable landscapes in the eastern United States: the New Jersey Pine Barrens, 1.1 million acres of pitch pine and oak forest sprawled across seven counties, the largest remaining example of the Atlantic coastal pine barrens ecosystem. The soil is acidic, nutrient-poor, and unsuited to farming, which is why - sitting in the middle of the most densely populated stretch of America - the Pine Barrens remained mostly empty. People did try to live there. The old iron furnaces of Batsto Village still stand. The villages of the so-called Pineys gave rise to a distinct mountain-style culture and, depending on which folklorist you trust, to the legend of the Jersey Devil. Today cranberries and blueberries are grown in the bogs that have built up from millennia of decomposing plant matter. Hammonton calls itself the blueberry capital of the world. The Pine Barrens supply much of the region's drinking water, and they sit, surreally, less than two hours from Times Square.

Camden grew up across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, became the headquarters of Campbell's Soup in 1869 and the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901, and lived for decades as one of the Northeast's manufacturing powerhouses. Its decline after World War II was steep and brutal: from 125,000 residents in 1950 to 85,000 by 1980, with the median household income falling to $18,007 by 2006, the lowest in any American city over 65,000. Five miles east, Cherry Hill grew the opposite way. The old Delaware Township renamed itself in 1961 for a shopping mall on Route 38, and over the same decades that Camden was hollowing out, Cherry Hill exploded from 10,000 residents to nearly 65,000. The two municipalities share NJ County Route 537. They demonstrate, more starkly than anywhere else in the region, what suburbanization did to American cities and what it built in their place. Money magazine declared Moorestown, just up the road, the best place to live in America in 2005. The same magazine never wrote about Camden.

On April 23, 1980, the town council of Egg Harbor voted to support the creation of a new state of South Jersey. The idea had begun as a joke - an editorial by Mount Holly newspaper publisher Albert Freeman proposing secession - but it caught fire across the region. The grievances were concrete. The Meadowlands Sports Complex had just been built in the north with state backing while Trenton refused to support the Garden State Park Racetrack near Cherry Hill. State infrastructure money flowed up the New Jersey Turnpike but rarely down. A non-binding referendum went to six South Jersey counties in November 1980 (Camden and Gloucester were excluded). Fifty-one percent of voters said yes - they wanted to secede. Only Ocean County voted no. The state of South Jersey did not happen, because Article IV of the U.S. Constitution requires both state legislature and Congressional approval for any new state carved from existing territory, and neither was forthcoming. But the referendum stayed in the regional memory. South Jerseyans have not stopped thinking of themselves as a separate place.

Run a finger down the South Jersey coast from north to south and you trace one of the most distinctive vacation landscapes in America. Atlantic City - the first place outside Nevada where Americans could legally play craps, the place that built the world's first boardwalk in 1870, the place that turned itself in the late 1970s into a casino city and then spent the next forty years figuring out what that meant. Ventnor and Margate and Longport, the smaller boroughs sharing Absecon Island. Ocean City, dry by ordinance since its 1879 founding by Methodist ministers. Sea Isle City and Stone Harbor and Avalon. Cape May, with its remarkable concentration of Victorian architecture preserved when the rest of the East Coast was bulldozing it. The Wildwoods, where the doo-wop motels of the 1950s and 1960s have somehow survived. Each of these towns has its own personality, its own demographic, its own particular slant on what a summer at the shore is supposed to mean. They share a thin barrier of dunes, the Atlantic on one side, the salt marshes on the other, and the long thread of the Garden State Parkway running down the spine of the mainland.