Which states are Upper Midwest?

[muon2]

I think this is in my wheelhouse. I was born in Chicago from a family with roots in eastern IA. I was raised in the Twin Cities with extensive visits to WI. I settled back near Chicago with family spread throughout the Midwestern states.

Let me take MN nice as the quintessential attitude of the upper Midwest. You'll definitely find it in western WI as east as far as Madison but not in Milwaukee. There's a closely related breed in southern MN and eastern IA, and that's probably the better fit for Madison as well as the whole Driftless Area into nw IL. Western MN also has a lot of that same MN nice (I think of Lake Woebegon, even though there are a lot fewer lakes in western MN). That western style of MN nice matches most of western IA and the Dakotas. I'd have put the western Dakotas there, too, but a lot has changed in the last 20 years with the rise of fracking and other mining technologies.

If I ignore the Midwest vs Plains division, the grouping of states would be MN, WI, IA, ND and SD, but only all of MN.

[muon2]

The Dakotas are not in the Midwest.  They are Plains States.

Thank you.

Visit Fargo or Sioux Falls and then try to convince me they aren't as much Midwest as Des Moines.

[muon2]

I was born in Chicago and live in Chicagoland now. As a child I was raised in Dallas, Omaha, and Des Moines and finally in the Twin Cities. I went to college in southern MN and spent time visiting my father's family in eastern IA. My brothers settled in southern WI and KC, and my mother ended up in KC as well. I claim some expertise in the nuances of the region.

I just finished a trip from Chicago through NE to ID and back again through ND and MN. I've made other similar road trips west over the last couple of decades and I like to stop at places along the way. Just from my last trip it was pretty clear that there was a marked transition between Norfolk and O'Neill in ne NE and Ainsworth just two counties west. That transition is probably what most would consider the  change from the Midwest to the West. By the time one gets to Scottsbluff NE it is clearly the west, and even the dialect has shifted.

My trips across northern and central ND in the last three years show a similar divide. If there's an Upper Midwest centered in MN, Bismarck is surely in it. As a long time Minnesotan. I couldn't tell I wasn't in MN when I was in the ND capital. The land and dialect had both clearly shifted from the western feel of Dickinson and Williston. Minot seemed to be on the border.

I would say that Bismarck, Pierre, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids, Madison, Green Bay, and the UP are roughly the borders of the Upper Midwest.

[muon2]

When I look at regions of whole states I separate the Great Lakes from the Great Plains. Together I consider them to be the Midwest. I classify the whole states by the bulk of the population, not the land area. The puts WI in the Great Lakes due to greater Milwaukee and the Lake Michigan communities, and splits it from its Upper Midwest sibling MN.

Basically I can divide the vast Midwest into eastern and western states as I described with Great Lakes and Great Plains. Doing so follows the economic divisions of the region. I could also divide the Midwest into an Upper and Lower Midwest that follows the linguistic patterns more than the economic ones. If the counties are regrouped into alternate states it allows collecting both linguistic and economic patterns together.

[muon2]

Is there actually an Upper Midwest, or is a transmorgrification of the Upper Mississippi?

There are companies and media outlets that describe themselves as serving the Upper Midwest, and though I've heard that label most often in the region of the Upper Mississippi, I've never heard the description Upper Mississippi applied that way. I've only heard Upper Mississippi applied in the geological sense or to describe pre-Columbian cultures.

[muon2]

Is there actually an Upper Midwest, or is a transmorgrification of the Upper Mississippi?

There are companies and media outlets that describe themselves as serving the Upper Midwest, and though I've heard that label most often in the region of the Upper Mississippi, I've never heard the description Upper Mississippi applied that way. I've only heard Upper Mississippi applied in the geological sense or to describe pre-Columbian cultures.

Have you ever heard the term Lower Midwest? Would someone from Kansas or
Indiana say they were from the Lower Midwest?

The North American Baptist Conference has a Upper Mississippi region (MN, IA, WI, IL).

I'm not saying that the area of the Upper Mississippi became the Upper Midwest, but the concept of "upper-ness" may have come from the river divisions, and of course there is clear distinction between Upper Mississippi and Lower Mississippi, except perhaps for the bit between St. Louis and Cairo.

538 ran a survey that agreed with my definition. Most Midwesterners agreed that the Midwest included their State and its neighbors.

Perhaps the Upper Midwest label evolved to give more breadth than what the NABC or the geologists would use. With the Upper Midwest label the Dakotas and UP can be included without referencing the river basin of including IL. As a native, I don't associate Chicagoland with the Upper Midwest, it's just the Midwest.

Perhaps it also came from people reacting to the dialects of the area. I see that my conception of the Upper Midwest closely matches the region of the North Central dialect from the UPenn Linguistics study 20 years ago.

[muon2]

Jimrtex, if places like Ohio are not in the Mid-West, then what region do you think OH is in?

Based on the linguistic map, the northern portion (Cleveland, Toledo) should be part of Northlands that extends into New York, includes all of Michigan, eastern Wisconsin, Chicago, northwestern Indiana, and then extending into the areas of heavy German and Scandinavian settlement through Wisconsin, Minnesota and into the Dakotas and Montana.

The area to the south would be Midlands.

As a linguist who's worked closely with students of Labov, who developed this map, I must point out that dialect regions don't necessarily indicate cultural regions. They are not mutually exclusive, but shared dialectal features are indeed historically indicative of others shared experiences such as: migration, geographical breaks, economic ecology,  etc.

In short, speakers from places like PA and WI can share the aforementioned features in their speech patterns while still being from two very distinct cultural/geographic regions.

I would agree that dialects don't tell the whole story. They represent the the patterns of settlement that populated are greater Midwest. Since that settlement was generally east to west, the dialect bands separate the area into a northern and central region.

One could also look at the division in terms of the economic and cultural differences, and that's what Garreau did in his 1981 Nine Nations of North America. He held there was no Midwest but a Breadbasket to the west of Chicago and a Foundry to the east with Chicago acting as the key trade center between the two. In Garreau's sense, the area I think of as the Upper Midwest is the Northern Breadbasket.

[muon2]

I've always liked Garreau's map, but just think it's a little too imprecise.  For example, I believe pretty strongly in a "Plains" buffer-region between Mid-West and Mountain West, and a division between Upper South and Deep South.  Also, I think his "Foundry" was a bit of a product of the times.  At that time, NYC and Philly (and many large Northern cities) were in a period of decline, and I get the impression he just sorta lumped them all together, conflating them.

However, the Mid-Atlantic has always been distinct from the Great Lakes historically, and this became evident once again, when these cities turned around and the I-95 corridor from DC to NY developed into a megalopolis.  Since these cities hit their nadir, probably sometime in the 80s, the two regions have gone off on their own paths.. much like they always have throughout US history.

Muon, have you read Woodward's American Nations?  

He has a map and draws his regions based heavily on original settlement patterns.  I think its a good read, but my main criticism of his regions is that he considered the original ethnic settlement too much, and did not consider cultural changes and migration patterns post 1800s enough.

My regional map was an attempt to improve on both Woodward and Garreau.  I'm not so vain as to think it's "better," but at least I'm more satisfied with it.

I have both books. I agree that Nine Nations has some dated elements. The rise of fracking has moved the boundary between the Empty Quarter and Breadbasket to the east. I was in Williston ND 2 years ago and it was clearly an Empty Quarter town.

I also agree that American Nations is too fixated on the original settlement patterns and it fails to see east-west splits in many of the original nations as they settled west and developed their own cultures.  Minneapolis is not like Detroit and Toledo is not like Des Moines though both are paired together in AN. The pairing them like NN does is much more accurate IMO.

[muon2]

I wasn't aware of the 1950's study. In many ways The groupings make more sense to me, especially the Middle Atlantic shift and the creation of a Southwest region. Even the current census suggests that it would have made sense to change, too.

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As I could have guessed, the data users were more concerned about longitudinal consistency in time, than adapting to recognize broad changes in economy and demographics. It certainly suggests to me that one shouldn't give too much credence to some of the official Census regions as measures of regions today. If the Census thought it useful, I'd like to see them redo the 1950's study to see how states would be grouped today by that metric. For example would VA shift to the Middle Atlantic given the changes over the last half century? Better still, I'd like to see the Census take up this exercise in a formal way every 50 years.