Eastern Wyoming and Montana are the Great Plains, so that at least makes a little sense. Idaho though, there you have me. I am at a loss. Maybe it’s their poor public education system?
I would consider the Rockies as their own distinct cultural and geographical region, tbh. Most of Montana that I’ve ever seen wasn’t in the mountains but that could just be a matter of perspective.
I was born in Nebraska and lived there until my early 20s when I moved to Wyoming and I’ve been here for 30 years. I’m very familiar with both areas. The “Great Plains” stops somewhere in the western panhandle of Nebraska. The pine forests up around Chadron (NW corner) have nearly nothing in common with the Cottonwood infested prairie down around Lincoln (SE corner). If you want to stick along I-80, which makes the discussion easier, there’s a solid argument that the “Great Plains” ends somewhere West of North Platte and East of Sidney.
The drastic reduction in precipitation is mirrored by a change in the soil as somewhere around there the soil changes from the rich dark farmland of the East to the tan sand hills of the West. Following the water and soil change the plant life itself becomes notably different; its not only less dense it also has far less of the native prairie grasses in it. The change in plant life also makes the animal life different; for example there are no Antelope on the Eastern side but as you go West they start appearing. Deer and Elk are also different with White Tails disappearing as you move West but Mule Deer and Elk starting to appear. Nebraska has not Native Moose population that I’m aware of but by they can be found even in South Eastern Wyoming.
I’ve stomped around Colorado and Montana a fair bit too over the last 30 years and it’s no different there. The Border Area of Colorado and Kansas is vastly different than the area around Lawrence, Kansas or Manhattan on the East Side. It’s the same with the Eastern Border of Montana up against the Dakota’s; there’s notable and large differences between that area and everything East of North Platte, Nebraska.
The Great Plains as embodied by Iowa, Eastern Nebraska, and Eastern Kansas are separate and distinct from the High Plains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.
I mean, southwest Colorado was part of the Dust Bowl. Culturally it’s definitely part of the Great Plains area. I would argue that eastern Wyoming and Montana are as well. They have more in common with the Dakotas than they do with the Rockies.
I still wouldn’t consider it the Midwest, but at least there’s a tenuous thread of logic to the idea.
Southwest Colorado would be Durango / Montrose which is on west side of the Rockies! You think that’s part of the Great Plains area?
Even SE Colorado such as Pueblo and Lamar are very distinct from towns and cities east of North Platte, Nebraska.
Culturally Eastern Nebraska is heavily Germanic / Western European Immigrant. Hell up into the 2000s there were still lots of little churches with at least one weekly service conducted in German. You won’t find that in Pueblo.
I’m struggling to understand all of these cultural similarities that some of you see. Yes they’re all Americans but everything from the type of soil they live on to their ancestry and immigration patterns is WILDLY different between Lincoln and Pueblo.
I lived in the States for five years and I still don’t really get what Americans mean when they say the midwest. I guess that’s partly because Americans also don’t know, so you never get the same explanation twice.
It’s all the middle junk nobody wants which is why there’s so much of it.
Seriously tho, the historic context is that “The West” was west of the Mississippi river, which iirc got started calling that after the Louisiana Purchase. So the previous “west” wasn’t accurate enough so the states between the Mississippi and the Appalachian mountains (chiefly the northern states around the Great lakes). Then the area has just kind of expanded to include the plains states since they’re also flyover country
Pretty much, there’s some pretty clear distinction as well. Like you won’t find anyone on any part of a coast calling themself a midwesterner obv, but also the south east has the distinct trait of being The South, for better or worse. Usually worse. Southwest also gets a similar effect from being what everyone thinks of as “cowboy country”.
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.
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.
Read a US history book on the westward expansion and it will all make perfect sense. Hint; it might have something to do with older names remaining in use up until the current day.
It’s probably named by the people who named middle East, like it’s the west of the eastern Nations but they named it coz it was in the middle of their way to the east
They are roughly in the middle of the west, as a whole country. I think our Midwest is fairly far east, due in part to the fact that the western edge of the USA was once much further east, and many conventions have survived from that time.
I am from Illinois, which fits most folks idea of what is midwest, but it’s really and truly just…middle
Illinoisan here, Pennsylvania and Idaho need to get their heads checked. I wouldn’t consider anything west of Kansas or east of Ohio(being generous there) as Midwest. Also just about anything south of the Missouri Compromise Line is a southern state, the Midwest is not the home of traitors.
Then y’all need to get Ohio to stop giving northern Kentucky Skyline chili if you don’t want them to be somewhat midwestern and southern at the same time. But you damn right about Idaho, culturally they’re closer to Floridian that anything else
I’ve never given Ohio anything other than ridicule lol and Kentucky is southern so them influencing Ohio would be trying to make them southern but they’re bordering Canada so that doesn’t work.
I don’t think Ohio is mid west… I know(think) it had something to do with the original 13 colonies but at this point the naming conventions need to change definitions.
Pretty sure they're implying that the region west of the 13 colonies was called the Midwest, not that Ohio was considered the Midwest because it was one of the original colonies...
That leaves the majority of the country as the Midwest then and that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Really trying to make states fit into 3/4 designations doesn’t work, we need to split them into like 8 to make sense
So originally anything west of the Appalachian mountains was called the west. Then as they explored more of the land and gained territories the line that defined the west moved to the Mississippi, making the territories between the Appalchians and Mississippi the Midwest.
Now the regions are split based on census data, and there are huge swaths of land in the West and Midwest that are sparsely populated so they are larger regions in size.
It makes sense if you actually look into it and take a 5 minute google search to learn about it.
Sure, but designations from 200 years ago are irrelevant to a modern nation spanning a continent with colonies and military bases spanning the globe. To call everything west of the Appalachian mountains “the west” is nonsense now
Wait until you see the Confederate flags in PA. Ya know, where the battle of Gettysburg happened. Very much not a southern state. It’s wild seeing this shit in my neighborhood.
So much not a southern state that its bottom border is literally the Mason-Dixon line. Some people are, indeed, whack.
I have seen Confederate battle flags flying on trucks and houses in and around Gettysburg, no less. I get the impression that people are not doing this for historical reenactment purposes…
Seriously. I live in the Cleveland area of Ohio. We are geographically closer to Canada than the Mason Dixon. There’s still an abundance of hoople heads flying confederate flags.
It won’t “rise again” but the spirit of it absolutely has resurfaced in other forms, and will continue too so long as a significant number of people in this country identify with white supremacy and abject hatred.
The original KKK were effectively the remnants of the Confederate army + new recruits. And it’s continued to find new banners in the generations since.
I don’t think that’s anywhere close to universally true but even if it is that’s only one more example of why we should never listen to those kinds of people. That opinion is dumb, inaccurate, shallow, and more than a little white-washed.
This is similar to the line my neighbor tried to pull. He had one of those half-and-half flags that was the US flag on one side and Confederate battle flag on the other. Somebody came by in the dead of night and stole it. It became a big hoopla on the block. He tried to tell me, “It’s got nothing to do with racism. It’s just a rebel flag because we’re just rebels in general and ain’t nobody tell us what to do.”
So have an anarchy flag or fly the Jolly Roger or something instead. For fuck’s sake. I don’t know if he actually believes that line of shit, or if it’s just a cover. (He also has a Trump election sign, one of those corrugated plastic ones, stuck in his screen door. So I suspect the latter.)
Even worse are the ones I see flying in West Virginia – you know, the state that only exists because its inhabitants didn’t want to secede along with the rest of Virginia.
it was settled by a lot of the same type of Germans who continued west from there during the mid 19th Century.. and its proximity to Cleveland has always sort of made it the easternmost Midwestern city..
Aside from the Browns/Steelers rivalry, I don’t get why there is so much animosity between people in the two cities. Having lived there for a couple of years after growing up in NEOhio, I miss Pittsburgh, and there’s a lot of commonality to be shared there.
Pennsylvania does seem to be really far east for anyone to legit think that they’re in the Midwest, but I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting, yet, and don’t know much about the people there. I can offer some perspective on a couple states that aren’t exactly Midwest states:
Eastern Colorado is geographically and culturaly indistinguishable from Kansas, so I can see how people living in that area could consider it being the Midwest.
Since Oklahoma, my home state, was mostly just Native American territories it wasn’t really part of either side of the civil war and so I think a lot of today’s population don’t want to be associated with the south and its history. I personally would hate to be called a southerner, but I don’t think midwesterner is necessarily the right fit either.
St. Louis is actually referred to (by its tourism board, at least) as “The Gateway to The West”. So, if it’s not mid west, I don’t know what they’re thinking.
To say nothing of Idaho… What bunch of fucking morons. The state is one away from the left coast and they’re calling themselves “mid” west? Are they actually that stupid? (Yes, rhetorical.)
I mean, if we went with what the word should indicate, Idaho is absolutely the Midwest. As it stands, there’s no Mid or Mideast, the real “Midwest” is actually just the middle of the country. At this point, "Midwest* has almost nothing to do with relative location, it’s more of a social and economic distinction, which Idaho does fit in with imo.
IIRC, the term was founded when “The West” was pretty much everything west of St. Louis, but it’s been decades since primary school, so I could be (and often am) mistaken.
That map for the Mason-Dixon Line is not correct. The original line was at that latitude but it ended at modern day West Virginia. It was the line of demarcation between Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland. It was used in congressional debate during and after the the Missouri Compromise to refer to the line of division between slave states and free states which lead to an unofficial expansion. Since the 1820s it has been understood to move directly north from it's original endpoint until it hits the Ohio River then to follow the river west to the Mississippi River then to travel along the eastern, northern and western borders of Missouri. It ends on the 36°30' parallel and extends straight west through the Louisiana Purchase. The 36°30' line was applicable in the territories but not among the states. The Mason Dixon was the line of separation among the states.
When the Democrats decided they wanted to be the “Urban Elite Party” and paint the Republican party as the “Rural Uneducated Party”, they basically threw away Iowa. Iowa is as middle class plain-folk as you can get, so they will naturally align in opposition to the Urban Elite. That was a tactical error in how the Democratic Party formed its identity.
100 percent spot on. It’s also a huge part of how they lost such a ridiculous chunk of blue collar workers in spite of labor leadership being solidly Democrat for decades.
Poor whites and rural hicks became the only working-class people it was still socially acceptable to openly mock in public. This was noticed and exploited by the right with dire consequences for our current political landscape.
Of course, a ton of other variables were at play as well, but the certainty that so-called “coastal elites” held them and everything they valued in contempt played a huge role in convincing blue-collar and middle-class rural whites to vote against their economic interests.
I believe it’s because these states are west of the Mississippi River and something something Louisiana Purchase (high school history was decades ago).
Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan are east of the Mississippi. We couldn't reliably cross the Appalachian Mountains until shortly before the American Revolution. Expeditions before Daniel Boone forged the Wilderness Road had to go around so the most direct route between NY and where Chicago is now went about halfway down Alabama. The Appalachians were the original western frontier and the Midwest was the Northwest Territories. As the country expanded westward and new territories were established and the Northwest Territories gained statehood they became the Midwest.
Yeah, living in Colorado has always been weird hearing that we’re “the west”. We’re about as middle of the country as you can get. 3 states to our west to get to the Pacific, 4 states to the east to get to the Atlantic.
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