Is the term midwest to broad?

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Riverite
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Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by Riverite »

Do you guys think the term Midwest is to broad? I find that Kansas City seems to have little in common with the rest of the Midwest. I feel like the midwest should be split up into smaller sections that more accurately reflect its problem. I feel like we should be called the Heartland along with Omaha, and Des Moines which is also half northern central like Minneapolis and Madison. There could also be Great Lakes, and French Mississippi (St Louis half with great lakes and New Orleans). How would you all define the different subsets that make up the Midwest?
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by brewcrew1000 »

How do you find it different? I feel like KC pulls influences from all over the Midwest and even Dallas/OKC which aren't really in any kind of category
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by swid »

FiveThirtyEight had an article a few years back about how nebulous "the Midwest" is as a regional definition.

Also unsurprisingly, few people are willing to place Missouri as a whole either as a Midwestern or a Southern state.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by brewcrew1000 »

This places Missouri in the south
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by warwickland »

Riverite wrote:Do you guys think the term Midwest is to broad? I find that Kansas City seems to have little in common with the rest of the Midwest. I feel like the midwest should be split up into smaller sections that more accurately reflect its problem. I feel like we should be called the Heartland along with Omaha, and Des Moines which is also half northern central like Minneapolis and Madison. There could also be Great Lakes, and French Mississippi (St Louis half with great lakes and New Orleans). How would you all define the different subsets that make up the Midwest?
you can get in the car at lawrence and drive the 700 miles to eastern-central ohio on I-70 and in general it largely feels like the same region until you begin approaching appalachia (in ohio), with outstate missouri being a bit of an oddball presenting more southern with the trucker pron shops and JESUS billboards. KC probably makes MORE sense, honestly, similar to Indianapolis in this way on the spectrum of what makes sense in the midwest and what doesn't.

the river cities are kind of their own weird overlay/ thing within this transect that have strange undercurrents reaching across more space/time that have more recently folded in on themselves

it wouldnt be very easy to split apart the midwest with KC in one region and say Indianapolis in another. I mean Illinois and parts of Indiana present like Kansas. the only part you could really break away would be the immediate great lakes.

you could seperate out the river cities, but they span the entire foundation of the midwest.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by chingon »

Embrace Pan-Midwesternism.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by warwickland »

chingon wrote:Embrace Pan-Midwesternism.
pretty much, i've tried dissecting the thing, dividing midwestern cities into the three categories of river/lake/prairie (or rail) but the end result is basically a sandwich of prairie-type cities between a slice of river city and lake city. granted the sandwhich gets messy west of st. louis/milwaukee but i guess its where the filling is coming out. in any case, the sandwich is a whole. cutting the sandwich into sections results in very similar smaller sandwiches...

i think that people on the west side of the sandwich tend to think the east side of the sandwich is considerably different and vice versa but i don't believe so. the difference in the flavors are more river to lake to prairie than east-west. much like the flavor profile of a sandwich...
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by WSPanic »

I always considered ND, SD, NE, KS and OK as the Great Plains or Plain States - not the Midwest.

MO is tricky. Western MO seems more like the Plains - the Eastern parts are more like the South.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

"MO is tricky. Western MO seems more like the Plains - the Eastern parts are more like the South."

My split is more north/south with the MO River more or less the dividing line. Of course there are those who probably say it's KC and St. Louis together and then the rest of the state.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by chingon »

WSPanic wrote:I always considered ND, SD, NE, KS and OK as the Great Plains or Plain States - not the Midwest.
A position complicated by the fact that the phrase "middle west" was invented to describe a section of the Great Plains, namely territorial Kansas and Nebraska.
Last edited by chingon on Sat Sep 23, 2017 2:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by chingon »

warwickland wrote:
chingon wrote:Embrace Pan-Midwesternism.
pretty much, i've tried dissecting the thing, dividing midwestern cities into the three categories of river/lake/prairie (or rail) but the end result is basically a sandwich of prairie-type cities between a slice of river city and lake city. granted the sandwhich gets messy west of st. louis/milwaukee but i guess its where the filling is coming out. in any case, the sandwich is a whole. cutting the sandwich into sections results in very similar smaller sandwiches...

i think that people on the west side of the sandwich tend to think the east side of the sandwich is considerably different and vice versa but i don't believe so. the difference in the flavors are more river to lake to prairie than east-west. much like the flavor profile of a sandwich...
"In any case, the sandwich is a whole" will henceforth be the official motto of the Pan-Midwesternist movement.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by shinatoo »

chingon wrote:
warwickland wrote:
chingon wrote:Embrace Pan-Midwesternism.
pretty much, i've tried dissecting the thing, dividing midwestern cities into the three categories of river/lake/prairie (or rail) but the end result is basically a sandwich of prairie-type cities between a slice of river city and lake city. granted the sandwhich gets messy west of st. louis/milwaukee but i guess its where the filling is coming out. in any case, the sandwich is a whole. cutting the sandwich into sections results in very similar smaller sandwiches...

i think that people on the west side of the sandwich tend to think the east side of the sandwich is considerably different and vice versa but i don't believe so. the difference in the flavors are more river to lake to prairie than east-west. much like the flavor profile of a sandwich...
"In any case, the sandwich is a whole" will henceforth be the official motto of the Pan-Midwesternist movement.
As long as we can agree that a hot dog is not a sandwich.

I call Missouri the Heartland.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

"As long as we can agree that a hot dog is not a sandwich."

Why is it not a sandwich?
Growing up I had hotdog sandwiches all the time. Easy to do as a young lad. Slice a hotdog lengthwise in the middle cutting almost all the way through. Warm up in a skillet. Take a slice of bread, cut in half, not corner to corner. Put ketchup on bread (back then yes just ketchup). After hotdog is warmed up put on one piece of bread then put the other piece of bread on top. End result - SANDWICH. :D
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by Highlander »

Riverite wrote:Do you guys think the term Midwest is to broad? I find that Kansas City seems to have little in common with the rest of the Midwest. I feel like the midwest should be split up into smaller sections that more accurately reflect its problem. I feel like we should be called the Heartland along with Omaha, and Des Moines which is also half northern central like Minneapolis and Madison. There could also be Great Lakes, and French Mississippi (St Louis half with great lakes and New Orleans). How would you all define the different subsets that make up the Midwest?
A lot of these terms were forged when the US population was heavily concentrated on the east coast and everything was viewed from that perspective. At that time, Ohio was solidly midwest but do we really want to call it midwestern today. Dallas, Austin and OKC were considered SW. But that was before anybody actually lived in the real southwest. Frankly, I think the traditional geographic delineation terminology in the US is pretty much defunct today. Only a few of the traditional geographic areas pinned by some discrete geographical feature or persistent culture still have any meaning today (deep south and west coast?).
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by flyingember »

shinatoo wrote: As long as we can agree that a hot dog is not a sandwich.
There's no need to agree on something where both claims are true. Just like with this definition.

A hot dog is fundamentally a type of sausage since it's a ground meat in an edible casing.

BUT the name is normally used to describe a hot dog sandwich preparation that makes up the majority of commercial sales.
If you want a Chicago style dog, a chili dog or such you are getting a sandwich unless you ask otherwise.

I can't think of any other common ingredient where you can ask for just the name a meat preparation and get a sandwich most of the time except for other types of sausages and I could argue most other sausages this is less true.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by Highlander »

WSPanic wrote: MO is tricky. Western MO seems more like the Plains - the Eastern parts are more like the South.
Missouri is at a crossroads and I think it's even more complex than that.

St Louis is definitely a traditional midwestern city more similar to Ciincinnati or Chicago than to KC. St Louis has never been southern. The large liberal german population in the city in the 1860's probably did more to keep Missouri out of the south in the civil war than anything else.

While KC has an old pre-auto midwestern-ish industrial center with the requisite density, I think it's a more westward leaning city today probably more similar to Denver and Dallas than to St Louis.

The Ozarks and boothill could be considered southern and the attitudes in those areas can be just as backwards as rule Alabama. That southern legacy does extend elsewhere into some of the rural areas of the state north of the Missouri River that were settled by southerners. While Missouri does have this legacy, it doesn't really pervade into the urban areas (with maybe the exception of Springfield) like it does in the true south.

Like most states, the bigger division in Missouri, however, is more rural/urban. That's true for the US in general. There's a difference between rural people of Pennsylvania and rural people of Missouri but I suspect the rural people of Pennsylvania are more like the rural people of Missouri than they are like the urban people of Pennsylvania when it comes to lifestyle and values.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

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WSPanic wrote:I always considered ND, SD, NE, KS and OK as the Great Plains or Plain States - not the Midwest.

MO is tricky. Western MO seems more like the Plains - the Eastern parts are more like the South.
have you traveled the missouri river valley east of kc to jeff city? or like, any of western missouri outside of kc? jesse james/border wars/confederate cemetary (confederate flags)? I-70 across 80% of missouri is like driving through tennessee, but with much more boring scenery. you definitely get more of a plains feel west of columbia but hell, i get a plains feel driving to indianapolis or peoria or chicago - which brings me back to my orginal posts on the topic.

most of outstate missouri has southern influences, eastern and western...the western missouri valley (richmond, lexington, lone jack, etc etc) in fact feels more southern to me than the eastern missouri valley (hermann, augusta, washington, etc). but of course southeast missouri is pretty southern...but feels different than southern inflected parts of western missouri or southwest missouri.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by warwickland »

aknowledgeableperson wrote:"MO is tricky. Western MO seems more like the Plains - the Eastern parts are more like the South."

My split is more north/south with the MO River more or less the dividing line. Of course there are those who probably say it's KC and St. Louis together and then the rest of the state.
northern missouri is pretty "flat-appalachian" too, surprisingly poor (badly maintained towns, sort of rust-belty, shuttered industry from maryville to moberly to macon to kirksville, trailers right in town) compared to iowa, which i think is a much better way to describe 50-75% of outstate missouri. the missouri river is no dividing line really in any important way like the ohio river is between kentucky and ohio.
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by flyingember »

I have been in every county in the state, most in some detail, so I've seen what's around.

Remember that people tended to move across the country largely from east to west for the same farming climate, going around the major mountains.

The lead belt will have more of a middle states feel back to the 1800s. You would have people Pennslyvania, Virginia on into Kentucky, southern Ohio and Illinois move into St. Louis and the northern Ozarks originally. The German population was after this period, I'm talking about the Scotch and Irish populations moving in.

The bootheel was a natural extension of cotton country obviously given it was supposed to be part of Arkansas.

The southern Ozarks feels culturally more like Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. It's more southern than areas further north but no Alabama southern.

And the northern farming country would have been heavily be populated by farmers from Illinois farther north.

Changes happened over the years of course, but these three general bands largely hold up today. You see a lot more people move to KC from Nebraska than Arkansas because of cultural fit.


I don't agree with this map, I think it's too simplistic, but it shows the idea.
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warwickland
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Re: Is the term midwest to broad?

Post by warwickland »

flyingember wrote:
And the northern farming country would have been heavily be populated by farmers from Illinois farther north.

Changes happened over the years of course, but these three general bands largely hold up today. You see a lot more people move to KC from Nebraska than Arkansas because of cultural fit.
i agree about KC...northern missouri i'm not so sure. seems more like migration via kentucky up the missouri and overland. there's quite a few northern missouri cities named after cities in kentucky and virginia. i've never seen anything to indicate that any appreciable amount of people migrated to northern missouri from illinois (northern/central). while western illinois (between the illinois and mississippi) is somewhat like northern missouri, it changes as you head west from indianapolis towards hannibal and over to st. joseph. hannibal and louisiana, mo certainly have some southern inflected stuff going on...well ohio river/kentucky inflected stuff. sometimes when i drive between hannibal and st. joseph i sometimes forget which direction im driving...they have some similar feels going on even though st. joe is much larger.

also the germans came into st. louis very early if we are talking about the real boom years after the creole era. a much earlier period than the plains germans like in kansas or even like minneapolis.
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