As someone from Illinois I'm always surprised Nebraska and Dakotas are considered the same region! But we all share a certain flatness and the central time zone. We're not the mountains, we're not the east coast, we're the middle.

Like my sibling says, it also helps to remember that Peoria, IL used to be the last settled town before you were in the western frontier, St Louis a little later (that's what that arch is all about).

The etymology dictionary has an interesting note on the matter [0]:

" Midwestern (1889) in reference to a group of states originally listed as West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas "

1889 Is the same year Montana and N/S Dakota was created !

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/Midwest#etymonline_v_14805

Iowa is peak midwest. It drops off as you move away from that center. I will postulate that the American midwest is mostly areas settled by Scandinavian immigrants with a little bit of German, Polish, and Dutch mixed in, mostly settled in the late 1800s by farmers. My own family was in this group and they were in direct contact with Native Americans, who watered their horses in their troughs.

Minnesota - definitely.

Wisconsin - definitely.

North Dakota - No. Might not actually exist.

South Dakota/Nebraska - mostly, but just the eastern quarter. The rest is West.

Missouri - Maybe a little bit on the border but mostly no. Iowa fought a war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_War) to keep Missouri out of the midwest.

Illinois - It's complicated. The northwestern corner is but no further than Rockford and nowhere south.

Kansas - probably not. It is mostly West.

Indiana - No.

Ohio - definitely not. Go find your own classification.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

If you want to suggest your own version of the Midwest, preface your claims that you are straying from ordinary/conventional usage. If you don't know what the Midwest is, allow me to inform you.

Chicago is the center of the Midwest, geographically and culturally. Always has been. Draw a big circle around Chicago, and that's roughly your Midwest states. Another good proxy for the Midwest is to look at the original members of the Big 10 athletic conference.

Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota are the Midwestern states. Maybe some of Nebraska and the edge of Kansas and Missouri, but that's as far as it goes.

Hmm, well I'm from Michigan and we always referred to ourselves as part of the midwest. Official we are (along with Indiana and Ohio):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States

Michigan is definitely there.

Before 1803, The Mississippi River was the Far West of the contiguous US terrirory.

New Orleans & further west still belonged to France.

Ohio and Indiana were known as the Midwest since they were about halfway to the Mississippi from the east coast.

Part of Kentucky is very close to Ohio & Indiana and the rest were Southern States.

Now Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and part of Missouri seem to have snuck in somehow but Dakota, Newbraska and Kansas are highly exaggerating.

No doubt Oklahoma and Texas are in The West, with almost all of Texas being part of the Southwest.

Midwesterners represent more like a regional/cultural designation than their geographical location, although both features do apply.

Western Pennsylvania is not very much like the East Coast either.

State lines really do a poor job of dividing regions nicely, like you've indicated. My home state of Ohio, for example, is a good demonstration of a border state. Southeast Ohio is definitely transitional-Appalachia, whereas Northwest Ohio is all flatland cornfields where you'd struggle to differentiate from Iowa.

I think your distinction is Upper Midwest vs. the legacy Northwest Territory/"Great Lakes" states. Midwest to outsiders seems to be a catch-all for "not West, not South, but west of the Appalachians" when in reality it's a mix of Great Lakes, Great Plains, and other gradients of other regions.

> Illinois - It's complicated. The northwestern corner is but no further than Rockford and nowhere south.

I'd say that anything north of the 618 area code would be very midwest, but once you get roughly south of I-70 the vibe is much more southern.

Of course, urban midwest can be very different indeed from rural midwest.

This is an interesting map that aggregates what various organizations consider to be the Midwest. Illinois is the only state that is on all such maps.

http://www.radicalcartography.net/midwest.png

Those states where originally the Midwest territories, which at the time were much more central than they are now.

Like half of them were originally the Northwest territory, the Midwest territory was never a thing.

The jump from Northwest Territory to Louisiana purchase basically defined the Midwest. Everything northwest of the Ohio River and east of the Colorado River has a fair claim at “Midwest.”

> who decided that Chicago, Ohio, and that whole corridor count as "mid-west".

The US Census Bureau named the region the Midwest in 1984. Previously the official name was the North Central Region. But the name Midwest has been used to refer to the region in an unofficial manner since 1886.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States

As someone who lives on the west coast I’m similarly struck by the occasional realization that states like Nevada and Colorado are considered in “the west”.

I’m guessing it’s because the terms were all defined by people on the east coast some time ago.

I grew up in Northern California, as in one county away from the Oregon border, and was confused by a child when people referred to the Sacramento and San Francisco areas as "Northern California" since we had to drive several long hours south to get there.

When I was growing up in South Florida (which does not include any of Florida's Gulf Coast no matter its latitude) in the very old days, they came out with a John Wayne movie called "North to Alaska" which had a catchy soundtrack.

For us it was always "North to Orlando" :)

There is a spectrum and it isn't just a east coast thing.

I think you can basically divide it out where the primary crop is wheat vs. corn/soybeans, and where the crop irrigation starts. As you drive from east to west, you can feel exactly where this line occurs.

People move around a lot - and let me tell you about what actual western residents like old CO front range and Montana residents think about SV California people moving in. But there is a bell curve-type shape as you move west of a certain kind of individualism, which tails off in central CA. You don't have to get much east beyond SF/Mountain View to get to the "real west".

"... Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Reserve....

More from Wikipedia: "Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Reserve, and Case Institute of Technology, founded in 1880 through the endowment of Leonard Case, Jr., formally federated."

Yeah as a Canadian I've always found this odd about the US geography. Here we are divided into west/coastal, prairie, central/great lakes/st lawrence, east/atlantic, and north...

Much of that sits right next to what the US considers "midwest", but it's very diverse in terms of terrain.