Summary: “The Useful South” examines how a range of informational, practical, and promotional films represents social identity in the American South in the two decades after World War II. The project analyzes how these films, made by government and commercial sponsors, script modern notions of gender, race, and class onto representations of changing built environments in the region.I focus first on industrial and educational films that depict rural and agricultural land being restructured in relation to white southern masculinity. White men in these films learn to perceive and cultivate land via industrial infrastructures and products that distance them from manual labor and paternal individualism associated with the South. I then examine the representation of southern women as symbols of class mobility, or immobility, as they learn to maintain their homes in home demonstration and family guidance films. White women, of both lower and middle classes, learn in these films to update the appearance of their home to signify modern purchasing power while black mothers struggle against overworked and cramped conditions to maintain the mental health of their families and children. Finally, I investigate representations of cities growing to accommodate mass consumption via urban planning and renewal. These films depict city planners and businesses collaborating to establish transportation and communication routes that centralize business districts with easy access to suburbs yet displace poor and rural fringes in an attempt to eliminate race and class problems from city views. Built into the three spaces on which my chapters focus—land, home, and city—is an image of modern white identity that displaces racial, class, and gender inequalities to facilitate continued economic growth and the promotion of a New South at pace with the nation.Nontheatrical films envisioned postwar modernization in the South as a spatial reconstruction of social identities and relations by engaging a slippage between built environments and images of the region. In examining these productions, “The Useful South” connects scholarship on nontheatrical film and the politics of representation in American culture by assessing the ideologies of race, class, gender, and place that shaped “useful” visions of the former problem region.