Midwestern United States

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The Midwestern United States (or Midwest) is the name used when talking about the north-central states of the United States of America. The states that are part of the Midwest are: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

The word Midwest has been in common use for over 100 years. Other names for the area are no longer used. These names include the "Northwest" or "Old Northwest", "Mid-America," or "the Heartland". Since 1929, sociologists have often used the Midwest as "typical" of the entire nation.^[1]

Contents 1 Geography 2 Culture 3 Accents 4 References

[edit] Geography

The land in the Midwest is generally thought of as being flat. This is true of several areas in the Midwest, but there are parts that are not flat. For example, the eastern Midwest near the Appalachian Mountains, the Great Lakes basin, and northern parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa are not flat. Prairies cover most of the states west of the Mississippi River. Less rain falls in the western Midwest than in the eastern part. This causes different types of prairies. Most of the Midwest can now be called either "urban areas" or "agricultural areas". Areas in northern Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, and the Ohio River valley are not very developed.

[edit] Culture

Midwesterners are sometimes viewed as open, friendly, and straightforward, or sometimes stereotyped as stubborn and uncultured. Midwest values were shaped by religious beliefs and the agricultural values from the people who settled in the area. The Midwest today is a mix of Protestantism and Calvinism, untrusting of authority and power.

Between 19 and 29% of the Midwest is Catholic. 14% of the people in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, 22% in Missouri and 5% in Minnesota are Baptists. 22-24% of people in Wisconsin and Minnesota are Lutherans. 1% or less of the people in the Midwest areJewish and Muslim, with slightly more Jewish or Muslim people in major cities, such as Chicago and Cleveland. 16% of the Midwest do not have a religion.

Politics in the Midwest are often conservative. The Great Lakes area, which has more large cities than the rest of the Midwest, tends to be the most liberal area of the Midwest.

Because of 20th-century African American migration from the South, many African Americans live in most of the area's large cities. However, there are still more African Americans living in the Southern United States than in the Midwest. The mix of industry and cultures in those cities led to new types of music in the 20th century in the Midwest, including jazz, blues, rock and roll. Techno music came from Detroit and house music and blues came from Chicago.

Today the population of the Midwest is 65,971,974, or 22.2% of the total population of the United States.

[edit] Accents

The accents of the Midwest are often clearly different from the accents of the South and many urban areas of the American Northeast. The accent of most of the Midwest is thought by many to be "standard" American English. Many national radio and television shows in the U.S. like this accent more than many other accents. This may have started because many television show hosts — such as Walter Cronkite, Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Tom Brokaw, John Madden and Casey Kasem — came from this area.

In some parts of the Midwest, the accents are quite different from the "neutral" accent of the rest of the Midwest. These accents usually are because of the heritage of the area. For example, Minnesota, western Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula have strong Scandinavian accents, which get stronger the farther north one goes. Many parts of Michigan have Dutch-flavored accents. Also, people from Chicago are known to have their own "nasal" accent. In the most southern parts of the Midwest, the accents are more like the Southern accent than the standard Midwest accent.

[edit] References

1. ↑ Sisson (2006) pp 69-73; Richard Jensen, "The Lynds Revisited," Indiana Magazine of History (Dec 1979) 75: 303-319, online at [1]

• Buley, R. Carlyle. The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period 1815-1840 2 vol (1951), Pulitzer Prize
• Cayton, Andrew R. L. Midwest and the Nation (1990)
• Cayton, Andrew R. L. and Susan E. Gray, Eds. The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History. (2001)
• Frederick; John T. ed. Out of the Midwest: A Collection of Present-Day Writing (1944) literary excerpts
• Garland, John H. The North American Midwest: A Regional Geography (1955)
• Jensen, Richard. The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (1971)
• Fred A. Shannon, "The Status of the Midwestern Farmer in 1900". The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. Vol. 37, No. 3. (Dec., 1950), pp. 491-510. in JSTOR
• Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton, eds. The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Indiana University Press, 2006), 1916 pp of articles by scholars on all topics covering the 12 states; ISBN 0-253-34886-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34886-9
• Terre Haute Tribune-Star (West Central news daily)
• Meyer, David R. "Midwestern Industrialization and the American Manfucaturing Belt in the Nineteenth Century". Vol. 49, No. 4 (Dec., 1989) pp. 921-937. The Journal of Economic History, [2], JSTOR.