Have to ask my mother, as I honestly can’t remember ( never lived in the area myself, just visited from time to time when I was fairly young ).
Interestingly enough my maternal grandfather, a rural or semi-rural law enforcement type ( sort of a family trade apparently, including brothers and cousins ), discouraged southernisms and southern accents in his children’s speech. Wanted his kids to sound more “educated.” My mother who fled for NYC at 18 never used them, but her siblings who stayed behind eventually picked them up again as adults.
Maryland would almost certainly have joined the Confederacy, if not for the arrest of her legislators and the imposition of martial law. The surest indicators of Southern sympathies at the time are found in the strongly sectionalized 1860 vote; Maryland was solidly aligned South, as was Kentucky. (The most divided states were Missouri and Pennsylvania.)
I’ve never heard Ohio not considered the Midwest. It’s part of the Midwest as far as the US Census bureau is concerned. Plus, the Big Ten conference was originally the conference for big Midwestern schools, and Ohio State’s been a part of it since 1912. Out of curiosity, do you consider Michigan part of the Midwest?
No. Only the easternmost couple counties lie in the outer penumbra of metro Washington’s extreme commuter set. By virtue of terrain and culture, nearly all of West-By-God is a lot farther away, even than it looks on a map.
:smack: Yes, yes of course yes, western NC. And the SW corner of Pennsylvania.
And if you take the “core” of Maryland between the Bay, a line at the latitude of Andrews AFB, and a line from Harper’s Ferry to where the Susquehana touches the PA state line, that zone has socioculturally de-southernified fast and thoroughly since the last quarter of the 20th century.
In the current era, we mostly have only 3 regions in the US: urban, suburban, and rural. IOW: Urban places like NYC, Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles have more in common with each other than they do with the rural parts of their respective states.
Suburbia is suburbia is suburbia almost regardless of which city it’s surrounding and which state surrounds it. There are greater regional differences between suburbs than there are between core urbs, but the local differences are still much smaller than the national similarities.
Rural areas are (much) less homogenized. Rural Oregon & rural Georgia share many attributes, but also still have many surviving regionalisms. Certainly far more surviving regionalisms than do the suburbs or core urbs themselves.
This overall outcome is a big change from, say, 1900 when suburbs hadn’t been invented yet and cities tended to be distilled & slightly better educated versions of their surrounding ruralia. That’s about the last time that regional-level groupings made much sense.
Yes, I’m overstating my case vs. reality. But only a little.
Applied directly to the case of WV my formulation would say rural WV is pure Appalachia. Whereas the capital city is just a DC suburb culturally speaking.
As the back-and-forth about Maryland by posters above demonstrates, the answer to “which region” depends largely on whether you’re talking about the urban, suburban, or rural counties.
And as others have said, cultural regions (to the degree they still exist) do not respect state boundaries. And do so less and less every year.
As I noted, Upstate New York is small rural communities. Their economy is based around farming and tourism. There are no big cities. They have a lot more in common with people in Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine than they do with people in Buffalo and Syracuse and Binghampton.
I do think you’re overstating the case: there is also small-town America. Any place that is attached to a small city or large village that has a downtown shopping area and is not suburban sprawl/tract housing. (I’m not sure where the line is where you cross into sprawl, but you lose suburban points for: having sidewalks, having trees, having heterogeneous housing stock, having housing that is not part of subdevelopment.)
I also don’t know what to make of places on the edge of small towns. They have a suburban feel to me because they are usually far away enough from businesses that walking would be a chore, are in medium-density housing with several acres per plot, have no sidewalks, and the ones on arterial roads tend to have bad traffic because you haven’t hit the speed-limited parts of the village yet. But that is a real edge case with only a few dozen cases per town.
I concur with the best single choice being Appalachia.
But for a small state, WV reaches into some diverse territory. Weirton and Wheeling have more in common with Pittsburgh than Appalachia. Morgantown (my home town) is effectively a border between the two regions. It’s been called “the geographic boundary between you all and you’uns”. Drive an hour south of Morgantown, and you’re in a very different place.
And the eastern panhandle is in the Mid-Atlantic - Martinsburg is becoming more and more of a DC/Baltimore bedroom community.
This newspaper article, in which notable West Virginians were asked to name the state’s defining foods, illustrates the divide.
Political author Michael Tomasky (a Morgantown native) chose pepperoni rolls. But aviation pioneer Chuck Yeager (who grew up in Hamlin, in the southern part of WV), responded to Tomasky’s choice, “Never heard of pepperoni rolls. Who is making this decision? Only ever had cornbread & buttermilk & leather britches.”
WV is best described as Appalachia. Also considered part of the South.
New England is specifically CT,RI,MA,VT,NH, and ME. One reason NY is excluded is because it was a Dutch colony. New Netherland did extend into New England originally, primarily along the coast, but the English took over the New England colonies without a fight I think. There really isn’t much that distinguishes upstate NY from New England, but it just ain’t part of it.
Ohio is, as many have stated, and according to the census midewest region (region2). And the[East North Central Division](East North Central States). My wife (from Iowa) constantly tried to fight me about Ohio (where I am from) being not midwestern until wiki proved me right and saved our marriage.
If New York’s identity is based around it being a former Dutch colony (which is a notion I’ve never encountered in a lifetime living in New York) then why is Vermont part of New England? Vermont was part of the Province of New York back when the Dutch were still around.
Beats me. I’m not claiming it makes all that much sense. But looking it up it appears that New Hampshire challenged New York’s right to ownership and won, then gave Vermont sovereignty for some reason. Sounds like they didn’t want New York to have the place but they didn’t really want it themselves either. I guess the New Hampshireans couldn’t stand those Vermont winters.
I think the Dutch imprint is still present and remembered in the area where it actually mattered, which is the twenty mile or so radius from the tip of Manhattan Island. There are dozens of Dutch names throughout the city.
