If we saw those numbers on a county-by-county basis we’d see the reality: the Midwest is a state of mind, not a state of the Union. For some geographical states, all or almost all of the state is in the Midwest. For many more states, only part of it is. Like @TokyoBayer’s map of Mormon influence.
Another factor is migration. If you moved from e.g. Los Angeles to someplace on the fringes of the Midwest, say St. Louis or Kansas City, it’ll feel very Midwestern to you. If you moved to that same fringe city from someplace in the core of the Midwest, e.g. Milwaukee, those same cities will feel very non-midwestern to you.
Which suggests that maybe we should discount the statistics associated with the large city(ies) in each state, as being much more full of “foreigners” with perhaps confused grading scales, rather than being full of died-in-the-wool natives who really grok their local culture.
Endless fields of corn and wheat define the midwest for me, not state lines. Farmland with little towns that form their own communities. So yes, perhaps part of Ohio and Michigan are not midwestern. I don’t think of the UP as midwestern.
I tend to agree. I live in western NY and I feel that the culture here is more akin to the Midwest than to the East Coast.
I feel New York has three cultures. Downstate New York which goes along the Hudson River from New York City up to Albany is East Coast. Upstate New York which goes along the Erie Canal starting west of Albany and running out to Buffalo is Midwest. And Northern New York between Lake Champlain and the Saint Lawrence is New England.
Midwest, to me, is corn, alfalfa and cows, preferably dairy cattle. (we were beef cattle farmers, I guess that’s why I’m such a contrarian. )
Midwest is small towns with a bank, a grocery store, a water tower, and three taverns.
Midwest is farms with irregular shaped fields carved out of whatever land was good enough. And lots of trees. The west is section-sized rectangular fields, broken up by section line roads. Barely a tree to be seen.
Oh, absolutely county-by-county would be a far better way of bearing this out. I’m partly interested to know how much of Cook County (Chicago mostly) does and does not consider itself Midwestern. There’s some assumptions upthread that southern Illinois may not consider themselves Midwest, but I suspect some urbanites may not either.
The demarcation line between the Midwest and the West, at least in terms of agriculture and climate, is the 100th meridian west. East of that line, maize is the dominate crop; west of it, wheat predominates. It has to do with how much rain falls in those areas, with the western side being dryer.
At least it used to be that way. Apparently climate change is moving the line eastward:
At any rate, no state borders fall along the 100th meridian. It goes through the middle of the Dakotas down to Texas. You can actually see this line on maps of the US that do not show lines of longitude, rainfall, or agriculture. Get a large map that has lots of small cities mapped. Stand back and just look at the density of town names. There’s a very definite line right at the 100th meridian where the density of names rather dramatically drops as one goes westward.
I think that she meant what @Si_Amigo and @Just_Asking_Questions said: Farmland, corn, dairy, cows, small towns that form their own communities. I wouldn’t attempt to define it myself, not having spent much time in the Midwest. I had a summer in Ann Arbor, but everyone told me it wasn’t a typical midwestern town.
It’s a college town located in the midwest. Of course larger towns don’t have cows and cornfields, but they are frequented by people from the smaller towns. Heck, people even take a bath and put on nice cloths to go to them on a Saturday night!
The West is one of four major (but unofficial) geographic subdivisions of the US. The others are Midwest, Northeast, and South. Don’t look for a strict concordance between the name of the region and the actual geography. After all, California is in the southern half of the US, but it’s not in the South.
I tried to dig into Northwest Airlines–the money came from Detroit, but Colonel Lewis Brittin bought out a failing airmail line flying from Chicago to Minneapolis/St. Paul, at least according to one source. Wikipedia is slightly different, so your explanation of the name may well be correct.
Farms in the Midwest fill their boundaries. Farms in the West are circles inscribed in their boundaries, because the water to irrigate them is more expensive than the land.
Because these terms were coined 150-200 years ago. When the borders were in different places. Both then and now, and every time in between, the one thing that stands out about the USA is how utterly NOT homogenous it is. Whether socially, economically, population density, wealth, climate, geology, etc., each area is very different.
None of those parameters map neatly to chopping the current continental 48 states into 4 equal and equivalent quadrants.
The Midwest is geographically those states who lie entirely between the Appalachians and the Rockies. This excludes Pennsylvania, Kentucky and the Great Plains/Mountain states.
Historically those states who remained in the Union. This includes Missouri because its legislature never voted to succeed pace an abundance of its rural population. It excludes Oklahoma, then a collection of forcibly relocated and therefore aggrieved Native nations who fought as co-belligerents alongside the CSA.
Culturally… well, no. Long ago, you’d find the Midwest in Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, William Inge; and the South in Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, etc. But now Regionalism is as dead as the soul of whoever’s the CEO of Disneycorp these days.
And they have long been understood to be part of the Midwest. As far back as when Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan was “That Son of the Middle Border.”
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