Interesting to me that Ohio and Michigan two states that I thought were firmly Midwestern identify less as Midwestern than what I always thought of as the Great Plains states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas.
As someone born and raised in the Midwest (Ohio and Illinois) and is currently a resident on the West Coast (Oregon), the way I define it is as such: if there is corn, it's the Midwest. If there are cowboys on horses, it's the west or southwest. Does your state touch the Atlantic or Pacific? That's what coast you are on (Hawaii and Alaska excepted).
But no one in Fort Collins to Denver to CO Springs to Pueblo (almost the entire population of the state) would ever say they’re in the Midwest. Those cities basically start the West.
I believe this is closer to reality. I forgot an east coast subgroup.
edit: It’s called the mid atlantic and people are big mad about its exclusion on a shitty, crude map in context to a discussion about the Midwest. lmao
Maybe an east coast subgroup could contain … OH I DON’T KNOW … MAYBE NEW YORK, NEW JERSEY, and most of PA!!! mfrs are pedantic af over a finger drawn map.
The US started as 13 colonies/states on the East coast. In the terminology, everything past that is “The West”, and this general area is the middle-ish part of that, so “Midwest”.
Maybe on a purely east west dichotomy, but if we’re using the typical 4 regions of the u.s. : Northeast, south, Midwest and west, then that is not right.
It’s the name of the region. The Great Plains aren’t particularly great either, they’re just big. It’s like how the Mediterranean isn’t really in the middle of the world
“Great” in that sense doesn’t mean “good,” it means big. You see the same use in a lot of bird names as in the great blue heron or the great auk, just off the top of my head.
78% of people polled in Ohio believe they are midwestern. People living on that border in Western Pennsylvania might identify geographically or culturally as midwestern, so 9% isn’t that surprising. Now if you broke it down and it showed that people living near Philly thought they were midwestern, that would be laughable.
Have you met anyone from Western Pennsylvania? You’d understand a number of them not knowing where they are on a map!
Lol I kid. Western PA, aka Pennsyltucky, is our Florida Man territory.
Ohio I definitely consider the start of the Midwest.
The others are right though mentioning the obscene number of rebel flags in PA though. My brother was guilty of it for a while in sad to say too. I’m in the Southeast, the most metropolitan part of the state, and they’re all over. They’re usually hung next to the MAGA stuff, which I’m sure comes as little surprise. Honestly I’d probably prefer the stars and bars to the Trump crap because at least the flag is aesthetically less ugly visually, and the person flying it could just be ignorant or is at least being honest about their beliefs instead of the poorly veiled hate the MAGA trash represents.
Arkansas was the surprising state to me. I guess I just don’t ever think about anything related to Arkansas so I lump it in with the Midwest instead of the South, which I think of as the tourist destination states.
Not only is Wyoming solidly in the west, Wyoming arguably defines the west. Cowboys, sagebrush, the Rockies… If any part of Wyoming is “the midwest,” so is the moon.
The truth is that pretty much everything about the western US starts with California and then spreads back out. This is because, due to the gold rush, California was settled and made a state first, while the rest of the western states remained “territories” and only achieved statehood much later as they too became more heavily settled.
Basically, the settlement pattern of the western states is backwards after about 1852 or thereabouts, with the California and the west coast filling in first, and the interior states filling in later.
According to google the town of Midwest, WY has 283 people, which is damn near half of the state’s population. So add in a few more confused cowboys and that checks out.
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