In the opening minutes of the 1993 movie “The Firm,” an in-demand Harvard Law School graduate named Mitch McDeere takes meetings with one legal firm after another, each offering him a different vision for his future. Does he want to be a judge someday? Would he like to have a lighter workload so he can start a family? Does the California lifestyle sound appealing? How about Wall Street?

Mitch (played with no small amount of “Top Gun” swagger by Tom Cruise) ends up choosing the under-the-radar firm Bendini, Lambert & Locke, in Memphis. He’s impressed by its down-home charm and likes that it is off the beaten path. New York? D.C.? That’s been done. Time to give Tennessee a try.

In a way, Mitch was a lot like America as a whole, circa 1993, when the “New South” was on the rise. I was living in my hometown, Nashville, Tenn., at the time, and I had just graduated from the University of Georgia. I was tracking all the little victories for my region — just as I was counting all the division titles for my beloved Atlanta Braves.

In 1993, the country had just put the former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton in the White House, with the former Tennessee senator Al Gore as his vice president. The Atlanta hip-hop acts TLC, Kriss Kross and Arrested Development were all over the Billboard charts. The sitcom “Designing Women,” set in Georgia, was a staple in the Nielsen Top 10. And masses of readers were buying the legal thrillers written by the Mississippi lawyer John Grisham.