Where is To Kill a Mockingbird set?

Quite simply, the story is set in the little town of Maycomb, Alabama in the middle of the Great Depression (the mid-1930s).  In Lee's brilliant way, she doesn't reveal this setting immediately and allows her readers to slowly figure it out in the first few pages.  On the first page, Scout says,

"If General Jackson hadn't run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn't?" (Lee 3) 

Soon after she admits her family "being southerners" has certain shames associated with them.  Finally, after seven large paragraphs we hear this:

When my father was admitted to the bar, he returned to Maycomb and began his practice.  Maycomb, some twenty miles each of Finch's Landing, was the county seat of Maycomb County.  Atticus's office in the courthouse contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and a n unsullied Cod of Alabama. (4)

This setting is incredibly significant in regards to Southern race relations of the time and the setting itself implies that there may be a significant amount of racial prejudice within the story, which turns out to be true.  The irony is that when Lee was writing this novel (in the 1960s) race relations hadn't improved much at all.  For example, the few changes that did happen (such as the Brown vs. Board of Education decision that ended segregation in 1954) were resisted sometimes violently by the masses in Southern towns, . . . towns just like Maycomb.