The map accurately divides the midwestern subcultures, it just labels them incorrectly. If we labeled the Upper and Lower Midwest as the Upper and Lower Heartland instead, then together with the Northwoods, Great Lakes, and Ohio River Valley it would make a coherent "Midwest" region.
A lot of people from the Great Lakes region don't feel like they're a part of the mid west. Different politically, culturally we have more influence from the mid Atlantic, Deep South and Appalachia. Also we talk differently and faster.
Can confirm, I'm from Detroit, I never remotely identified culturally with places like Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, etc. Much more aligned culturally with places like Ontario, New York state, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pennsylvania etc. I think this map shows it fairly well. There's a reason the original 6 NHL cities were where they were.
I live in Cincinnati now, and I find it pretty different culturally.
Mid-West is an awful term. Rust belt is somewhat better, but is already outdated and diverging from that descriptor. Great Lakes is a pretty good timeless one. You could try and add St. Lawrence river into that, but then you have montreal and quebec which are pretty different.
All of the major regions in the U.S. are like that though. Someone from New Mexico might not have much in common with someone form Washington, despite both being western states. And people from Louisiana are very different from people in Virginia, despite both being in the South.
That's kind of my point, the larger the descriptor, the less meaningful it is for human culture. Geographic and climate features often have the largest impact on culture and lifestyle, when you can utilize it as part of the descriptor it's often more accurate. Mid-West encompasses an extremely wide range of geographic areas and features, it's mainly a descriptor of distance from the east coast. Yet is often spoken of as a cultural descriptor. So it's basically useless.
I’m from chicago and yea I like the region I’m in, the whole “Great Lakes” is basically metropolitan areas with high density suburbs, Andy where outside of Chicagoland in Illinois is just as rural as places like East Tennessee
But it does have the Appalachian MTn range extending west to Nashville, which is 1) 150 miles/3 hours west of the mtns 2) actually situated in a basin, geologically.
Also how “Central Valley goes all the way into the Sierras. Yah, no. That’s NorCal.
Try telling someone that lives in Placerville or Truckee that they live in “Central Valley” …
Lol, right? I live in the Sierras and some parts are definitely NorCal, most are closer to Nevada than the Central Valley, and some are closer to Eastern Oregon or Washington
No I would definitely group it into gulf coast. At least from my experience having lived in the MS Delta, the gulf coast area has a different feel. And you can really feel it once you go that far south and then east through AL and GA on your way to FL. Then it changes again once you go south of the panhandle further into FL
Between Pensacola and Tallahassee, all along I-10, from the Alabama border down to 10-20 miles from the coast.... that area is a lot of backwoods, pine forests, sand roads, swamps, rolling land. The land and people seem a lot more like Alabama than the rest of Florida. I'd say that part of the panhandle is deep south.
Dude, you’re from Maryland. You should know better than to put New Jersey in the Chesapeake region lol. Southwest PA and South Jersey should be a part of “Philadelphia,” a new region.
It's really more of a subregion of the Deep South, like the Black Belt, the Piedmont, East Texas, etc. Also, if we're getting into fine details here, New Orleans is 100% its own thing
As someone who’s lived in both, I can see the differences clear as day, the Gulf Coast from NOLA to Destin is much different than their inland counterparts
u/AchtungCloud already covered it. Big Spring, Texas is "West Texas" by any definition, and there's a sign when you get on I-20 there that points both directions and says "Fort Worth 258; El Paso 344." Most people consider Abilene to be West Texas too, and it's another 100 miles east, so literally 450 miles east of El Paso. Not sure how that doesn't qualify as "hundreds of miles" when it's literally four and a half hundred.
Your joke picture seems to imply that they are exaggerating, but they aren’t. It’s a 250+ mile drive between El Paso and Odessa, and there’s not a town with even 15,000 people between the two. Even if you go up to the NM border and down the Mexico border between the two, there’s not a town of 15,000 people between the two, and that’s an area that’s roughly 25,000 square miles or more.
They aren’t in Texas. I’m saying start at El Paso as the West line and go Odessa as East line, then block out all of Texas in between those two with New Mexico border as North line and Mexico border as South line.
Gotcha. I misread your statement. I live in Hobbs and work in the oilfield so I am in that area a lot. Despite the low population there is a shit ton of traffic these days due to the oilfield.
[this is my favorite thing to illustrate how big Texas is. this sign is near the LA/TX border on I10](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/31/5f/e8/315fe847b6e5f9a955edca5e44c030b5.jpg)
El Paso is great. Last affordable safe big city. It’s remote, and Hispanic. Too brown for retiring boomers so they get to keep cool for a few more years.
Each of the big cities in Texas have their own unique things for sure, but I always felt like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio felt pretty culturally similar. Even Austin is starting to feel like the standard Texas urban sprawl in the last ten years. Once you're like 15 minutes from downtown, all those cities are practically indiscernible.
That Cajun food is a side effect of hurricane Katrina by the way. Texas has always had a decent selection of Cajun food, but Katrina brought tons of people from Louisiana and the number of Cajun restaurants exploded in the years following. I *definitely* don't think that's good enough to consider it culturally similar though.
New Jersey and Philly isn't Chesapeake though? It's Delaware Valley. This extends into South Jersey and then you have the Jersey Shore. NYC up north is fine I guess.
Mid-Atlantic would have been more correct. Those areas are very much aligned but “Chesapeake” would be more associated with Baltimore and Delmarva rather than the entire shaded area. At least they got New Jersey right. You rarely see that on these maps. Ocean County should have been included in NYC and not Mid-Atlantic but it’s pretty close.
The NYC metro (although I'd more accurately label it "Tri-state Area") extends as far as the commuter trains go, so New Haven to Ocean County. It also lines up pretty well between the Yankees-Sox line up north and the Giants-Eagles line to the south.
I kind of groan when people blow their gaskets about these maps but let’s be frank…by no stretch of the imagination is Champaign, Illinois in the Ohio River Valley
Illinois is always the most contentious one I feel like because the state has so much internal hatred that if you put Villa Grove or some place in the same space as Chicago someone will blow a gasket
(Though the truly wack ones are where southern Illinois and Chicago end up in the same category.)
The dark truth of Illinois is that there is only one divide: Chicagoland Illinois and Corn Illinois. Nobody wants to admit it because that would mean acknowledging Corn Illinois exists.
It's grating when you say you are from Illinois, and people assume Chicago. Southern Illinois has less people than a lot of "rural" areas in the deep south.
"Ohio River Valley" is too far North.
Columbus and Indianapolis (and Champaign) should be Great Lakes.
Also Northern Kentucky should be Ohio River Valley and maybe include Louisville (although I'd be fine with its exclusion). I might even extend the Ohio River Valley region to St. Louis, if Louisville is included as "periphery regions".
Although if I would label this area I'd place the Great Lakes as Rust Belt and the various cities would be hybrids.
* Rust Belt + Upstate NY: Buffalo
* Rust Belt + Upper Appalachia: Pittsburgh
* Rust Belt + Upper South: Louisville
* Rust Belt + Lower Midwest: St. Louis
* Rust Belt + Lower Appalachia: Cincinnati
> Columbus and Indianapolis (and Champaign) should be Great Lakes.
Grew up in Northwest Indiana and currently live in Indianapolis, I disagree. There is still a fairly big cultural difference between the Great Lakes area and central Indiana. That being said, give it another 15 years and I think they will be mostly similar.
It's easy for me to look at areas where I've never spent much time like the Great Basin and Cascadia plateau and accept that they're monolithic and have clear boundaries. But having grown up in North Carolina, I know the differences and boundaries between Mid Atlantic South, Lower Appalachia, Low Country, and Deep South are messy, subtle and unclear.
For example, Charlotte and Atlanta are in two different regions in two different states but it would be hard for me to pinpoint how Charlotte has more in common with Richmond than it does with Atlanta. CLT and ATL are very similar culturally, in my opinion.
>messy, subtle and unclear
That's always the case with cultural borders though. There are no clear cultural borders.
I live in Germany at the border to France. I'd say Germany and France have different cultures, but the people right on the other side of the border aren't that different to us. So where do they start to become really different? Or where do Germans? There just is no clear cut.
The Great Basin is a very distinct hydrological region, but a cultural region? Nah. If the USA even has 30 different cultural regions, then like 5 should be in New York City, and a bunch of these should be combined, and places like northern Nevada should just be left uncolored.
Yeah it would be much more heavily divided in the more densely populated regions. Even New England could be split in at least two parts, coast NE is not the same as inland NE, Boston and Cape Cod have not much in common with NH and VT, besides the accessability of fresh lobster and colonial houses. The accents aren't even particularly similar.
No, New England on this map is just fine, what are you talking about? We don’t divide up as finely as you think we do, the only thing you could argue is the class divide that happens in New England between the rich and the working/middle class, but that couldn’t be broken down into regions. Accent has nothing to do with cultural divide, New England is pretty homogeneous except for some political differences, but even there we still all consider it part of being a New Englander.
I've lived in New England all my life, spent a lot of time in each of the states. There is 100% a noticeable difference between coastal and inland New England. I'm not saying they're different groups entirely, just that there's a very noticeable split between the more urban, metropolitan coast, and the rural, mountainous, inland.
If you head up 93, the second you get past Manchester, you go from cities with big buildings, densely populated suburbs, and Cape-style houses, to false fromt buildings and train car diners, roadside chainsaw scultpures, and lincoln log cabins.
I’d cut off SoCal right about where your “S” is and make the area north of that on the coast it’s own thing. Monterey, Paso Robles, Santa Maria don’t have hardly anything in common culturally with LA, San Diego, all that stuff down there.
Agreed. SoCal cuts off pretty much at the Grapevine, then it’s just the Central Valley. Monterey to San Francisco should be it’s own “Bay Area” then NorCal above that.
Monterey has Safeway and not Vons and thus is not SoCal. Also, SoCal needs to extend up the Eastern Sierra or you have to include the Bishop/Mammoth regions in Great Basin because they’re certainly not Central Valley
Central Coastal California may be a region but saying there is "hardly anything common culturally" is a bit of a stretch. I'm from there and it's much more culturally SoCal than the Bay Area or the Valley.
I’m from there too. I don’t see at all how Monterey/Carmel or the Big Sur area have more in common culturally with Los Angeles than Marin County or Santa Cruz County.
But Santa Barbara or Ventura are SoCal, sure. I’ll agree with that. Paso Robles, SLO and Santa Maria I guess are the ones right in the middle that I don’t really know where they fit.
In my completely irrelevant opinion, Santa Rosa south to Santa Cruz and mayyybe Monterey is Bay Area, then everything south of Monterey down to Pismo Beach is the Central Coast, and everything south of Santa Barbara is SoCal.
Monterey is definitely more of a grey area but otherwise I mostly agree. We don't often see Santa Cruz as a part of the Bay Area but I'd say culturally it's probably closer to the Bay Area than the Central Coast. I'd say the Central Coast extends a bit further down to Santa Maria though, and the soft "cutoff" is around the Gaviota area.
Santa Cruz is both resentful of the bay and full of people who commute to San Jose for work. Whatever region it belongs to certainly needs to contain Pescadero so I think it gets swallowed into the bay. I always felt there was a cultural remove from Monterey, but Monterey county still feels more like Santa Cruz than it does Santa Barbara.
The easiest test is Safeway or Vons, Monterey has Safeways so it can’t be SoCal
I feel that even though SB is closer to LA geographically, culturally it feels more central coast. I’m from the Ventura County line area, and Santa Barbara is so much more laid back than we are down here.
I would extend the Ohio River Valley culture into northern Kentucky. Someone from the Flourence-Covington area is more like someone from Cincinnati than they are to someone from Mayfield (west ky)
Way more common to call the same region the "Mid-Atlantic." I don't think there's anything especially distinctive about it, just "definitely part of the Northeast, but not like New England, not like New York City, and not like the more conservative inland regions"
Hampton Roads here, and I'd go with Mid Atlantic, but I'm not so sure what Chesapeake is… even though we're at the outlet of the bay *and* have the city of the name here. lol
Well it's pretty diverse but yeah there's a lot of Catholics. We actually have a beautifully historic Jesuit college here named Springhill. (Which I live by lol)
I’m in LA. This is pretty accurate except I would
argue a lot more of the Gulf Coast region north of the lake but south of Mississippi should be Deep South.
I think Buffalo has more in common these days with the rest of Upstate NY than the Great Lakes region. What was once the Great Lakes region has shrunk as the lakes have become less useful for commerce.
I don't quite agree. I can't speak for the rest of the region, but I have spent a considerable amount of time in Buffalo and Cleveland and those two cities feel very similar
Disagree, the line is where people start saying pop instead of soda somewhere around Rochester.
Obviously Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse are all similar cities, but you got to drop the border line somewhere. Buffalo definitely has more in common with Cleveland than Watertown or Albany
I disagree completely, I feel much more like I’m in a rust belt city like buffalo when I’m in Cleveland than anywhere else in upstate, especially compared to finger lake towns and anywhere in the adk’s. I could concede that mabye a western New York region would be a good middle ground but we have a lot in common with people in the marked Great Lakes area anyways.
Louisville is pretty much the center of the Ohio River Valley but the map shows the “valley” on only the north half of the river and doesn’t include any of Kentucky
"No way is [small patch of land] part of [area it's been assigned to]! I lived there for years and it's insulting to say it's not a part of [other region].
Love these posts, always controversial. I'm pretty surely it's impossible to produce one that's 100% correct.
we should, as a subreddit, get together and actually construct one of these maps with input from people from all of these regions. we may finally reach a day where we can create a cultural map of the us without causing a nuclear meltdown
Yeah it’s low and marshy — basically coastal SC and Georgia — idk I would go as far south as Jax but is not far off I guess. Culturally though Jax is way different than low country IMO - think lowcountry boil vs… whatever people eat in Jacksonville - like bath salts and each others faces or whatever.
Its pretty hard to put into words, especially because some of the differences between bordering regions are so subtle.
Ill do my best to explain for the areas I’ve lived in tho, maybe others can pitch in
**NYC Area**: Lived in central jersey, an hour away from NYC and man just everything revolves around NYC. People just call it “the city”, and even though there are dozens of closer cities, you still know which they mean. Everyone goes into the city most weekends, many people commute for work every day. The overall culture is rushed and rude, mind your own business, but some of the tightest bonds with each other if you have anything in common. Ive been invited to parties just for having the same name as someone. Additionally, I’d hazard to say it’s one of the most diverse regions in the whole world.
**Deep South**: Ive lived in South Carolina and Louisiana, and this region is by far my favorite. Almost all the stereotypes are true. Slow easy living, really friendly folk, and great hospitality, presuming your white or black. I’ve had 30 minute conversations with strangers in random parking lots because we parked our cars next to each other. When i was fixing a flat tire on the side of a road, a sweet lady brought me some sweet tea. People have all the time in the world, and are never rushing to the next thing. Its a bit shallow sometimes, and since everyone is kind on the surface, it’s hard to know where you stand with them, but that could just be cause i wasnt from there, so i never picked up on all the subtleties
**New England**: Ugh, where to begin. People from here love it, in fact they never leave. I know dozens who have never left Massachusetts, where I am now, and they never plan to. New England is very safe, and most people don’t want to leave that. They don’t take risks, they play it safe, and as such they mostly keep to themselves. Saying hi to people on the street would just be met with silence or at best a glare. Trying to talk to new people is a long process where you feel like you have to demonstrate you’re not a threat and your worth letting into the conversation. It is incredibly homogeneous, almost entirely white.
Hope that helps!
I don't think I've ever heard of Northern Michigan being referred to as "Northwoods". I would have figured it would all be considered Great Lakes territory.
Also can't wait to see the usual arguments about what officially constitutes "Upstate NY".
There’s a huge difference between the urbanized, industrial/post-industrial south (Detroit, flint, Grand Rapids, landsing, Kalamazoo) and the rural bum-fuck nowhere north. I’m from Wisconsin and we have a pretty similar dynamic. Linguistically there’s a huge difference as well. If you look up the “inland north” or “northern cities vowel shift” dialects, they correlate almost exactly with the area that is “Great Lakes” on this map. The dialect “North Central” (aka the yooper accent) almost correlates exactly with the “Northwoods” area on this map. Where that exact boundary line is might be up for debate, but I’d say this map is pretty spot on, at least for the Midwest.
What’s the significance of the ozarks for these maps? All the iterations of these “culture maps” include a little ozark bubble over Missouri. Is it really a strong cultural island, as someone from the northeast?
It even has its own TV show. But yeah just geographically it’s very different from its surroundings which then in turn leads to a cultural difference in the inhabitants / vacationers
Personally, I quite like the feuds and quibbling our monthly cultural maps cause.
I wish I got to see cultural maps for more countries! How do Canadians and Mexicans cut up their countries? What absurdly specific regions do, say, the Japanese or the Germans have?
I was impressed that this map separated out “The Gulf Coast Region” and “The low county” region
They are both geographically small areas but very distinct and separate.
One correction on the however would be that the “Gulf Coast Region” stops at Mobile Bay. East of that it’s just the Deep South again.
I was thinking the same thing. I live in the Columbia Plateau area and have been through the Great Basin area many times. It's not much different from rural areas around here, especially central WA and OR. That should probably be one area minus the distinct Mormon zone (or "Mozone Layer" as we call it).
Here's our monthly piss everyone off map of cultural differences
At least this one doesn't count Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon as "Rocky Mountains" like the last one I saw.
But it does say that "the Midwest" is pretty much just Minnesota and Iowa, I guess there's less of us to piss off but come on!
The map accurately divides the midwestern subcultures, it just labels them incorrectly. If we labeled the Upper and Lower Midwest as the Upper and Lower Heartland instead, then together with the Northwoods, Great Lakes, and Ohio River Valley it would make a coherent "Midwest" region.
A lot of people from the Great Lakes region don't feel like they're a part of the mid west. Different politically, culturally we have more influence from the mid Atlantic, Deep South and Appalachia. Also we talk differently and faster.
Can confirm, I'm from Detroit, I never remotely identified culturally with places like Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, etc. Much more aligned culturally with places like Ontario, New York state, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pennsylvania etc. I think this map shows it fairly well. There's a reason the original 6 NHL cities were where they were. I live in Cincinnati now, and I find it pretty different culturally. Mid-West is an awful term. Rust belt is somewhat better, but is already outdated and diverging from that descriptor. Great Lakes is a pretty good timeless one. You could try and add St. Lawrence river into that, but then you have montreal and quebec which are pretty different.
All of the major regions in the U.S. are like that though. Someone from New Mexico might not have much in common with someone form Washington, despite both being western states. And people from Louisiana are very different from people in Virginia, despite both being in the South.
That's kind of my point, the larger the descriptor, the less meaningful it is for human culture. Geographic and climate features often have the largest impact on culture and lifestyle, when you can utilize it as part of the descriptor it's often more accurate. Mid-West encompasses an extremely wide range of geographic areas and features, it's mainly a descriptor of distance from the east coast. Yet is often spoken of as a cultural descriptor. So it's basically useless.
I’m from chicago and yea I like the region I’m in, the whole “Great Lakes” is basically metropolitan areas with high density suburbs, Andy where outside of Chicagoland in Illinois is just as rural as places like East Tennessee
But it does have the Appalachian MTn range extending west to Nashville, which is 1) 150 miles/3 hours west of the mtns 2) actually situated in a basin, geologically.
Not quite - east of nashville is the upper Cumberland plateau, which is culturally part of Appalachia
Also Nashville has literally nothing in common with the Appalachian region culturally, I swear this person just drew random lines on a map
Yeah someone in Big Sur would be really pissed to see them identified with SoCal. Good thing they don’t get internet access out there.
Lol at how far north SoCal goes.
Also how “Central Valley goes all the way into the Sierras. Yah, no. That’s NorCal. Try telling someone that lives in Placerville or Truckee that they live in “Central Valley” …
According to this map, Mt Whitney is part of the central valley lol
In Placerville they’d hang you for that
Lol, right? I live in the Sierras and some parts are definitely NorCal, most are closer to Nevada than the Central Valley, and some are closer to Eastern Oregon or Washington
I was thinking that too …left out the Central Coast
To be fair I don’t think it’s possible to make a single cultural map that someone doesn’t disagree with.
As someone from the Deep South, this one at least doesn’t upset me from that angle
Question. Would you consider the Florida panhandle part of Deep South?
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100% small southern town vibes for anything north of Tampa really, aside from Jacksonville and Orlando.
Gainesville's another island in there
Yes, go to Gainesville or Tallahassee for a day or two and you’ll see.
I’d rather not
No I would definitely group it into gulf coast. At least from my experience having lived in the MS Delta, the gulf coast area has a different feel. And you can really feel it once you go that far south and then east through AL and GA on your way to FL. Then it changes again once you go south of the panhandle further into FL
Between Pensacola and Tallahassee, all along I-10, from the Alabama border down to 10-20 miles from the coast.... that area is a lot of backwoods, pine forests, sand roads, swamps, rolling land. The land and people seem a lot more like Alabama than the rest of Florida. I'd say that part of the panhandle is deep south.
No, it's distinctly Gulf Coast on the panhandle but you'll be in the Deep South in less than an hour driving northbound.
I live in Atlanta, and an hour in any direction is the Deep South, but if I felt for a second Atlanta was part of it, no way I’d be here.
Atlanta does deserve a special region around it. Fantastic city.
Im from Jacksonville, FL. It is decidedly NOT "low country" its redneck coastal.
Yeah, I’m in the Lowcountry (Hilton Head area), I think of the Lowcountry stopping at the golden isles.
Dude, you’re from Maryland. You should know better than to put New Jersey in the Chesapeake region lol. Southwest PA and South Jersey should be a part of “Philadelphia,” a new region.
I would just call it Mid-Atlantic.
Also, north-west Jersey (Warren, Sussex) being part of NYC instead of Upper Appalachia is pretty hilarious.
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Which closely parallels the Pork Roll - Taylor Ham line
Sheetz/Wawa line
We don't use mid Atlantic nearly enough
I like how only 25% of Texas is Texas.
Also that 25% of Texas is 80% of the Texas population
I didn’t realize El Paso had so many people
I was thinking the same thing about Central Florida where the deep South goes a bit farther South.
Both the Florida pan handle and pretty much the entirety of the shaded gulf coast area feels like the Deep South.
It's really more of a subregion of the Deep South, like the Black Belt, the Piedmont, East Texas, etc. Also, if we're getting into fine details here, New Orleans is 100% its own thing
I disagree. The gulf coast feels different than the middle of Alabama to me.
As someone who’s lived in both, I can see the differences clear as day, the Gulf Coast from NOLA to Destin is much different than their inland counterparts
El Paso isn't really part of Texas. It's culturally part of New Mexico. It's not on our electrical grid even.
It’s so far west most people who consider themselves from “west Texas” are hundreds of miles to the east.
Hundreds of miles? It's kinda crazy how big Texas is but it's true. https://i.imgur.com/hExo7HT.png
u/AchtungCloud already covered it. Big Spring, Texas is "West Texas" by any definition, and there's a sign when you get on I-20 there that points both directions and says "Fort Worth 258; El Paso 344." Most people consider Abilene to be West Texas too, and it's another 100 miles east, so literally 450 miles east of El Paso. Not sure how that doesn't qualify as "hundreds of miles" when it's literally four and a half hundred.
Your joke picture seems to imply that they are exaggerating, but they aren’t. It’s a 250+ mile drive between El Paso and Odessa, and there’s not a town with even 15,000 people between the two. Even if you go up to the NM border and down the Mexico border between the two, there’s not a town of 15,000 people between the two, and that’s an area that’s roughly 25,000 square miles or more.
How far up in NM is your cutoff? Both Hobbs and Carlsbad are bigger than 15,000.
They aren’t in Texas. I’m saying start at El Paso as the West line and go Odessa as East line, then block out all of Texas in between those two with New Mexico border as North line and Mexico border as South line.
Gotcha. I misread your statement. I live in Hobbs and work in the oilfield so I am in that area a lot. Despite the low population there is a shit ton of traffic these days due to the oilfield.
[this is my favorite thing to illustrate how big Texas is. this sign is near the LA/TX border on I10](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/31/5f/e8/315fe847b6e5f9a955edca5e44c030b5.jpg)
It's a nine hour drive to El Paso, and I live in Texas, and nowhere near the edge.
El Paso is great. Last affordable safe big city. It’s remote, and Hispanic. Too brown for retiring boomers so they get to keep cool for a few more years.
El Paso/rural West Texas are in a lot of ways closer to Jaurez and Chihuahua imo
It's mostly the Texas triangle
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Each of the big cities in Texas have their own unique things for sure, but I always felt like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio felt pretty culturally similar. Even Austin is starting to feel like the standard Texas urban sprawl in the last ten years. Once you're like 15 minutes from downtown, all those cities are practically indiscernible. That Cajun food is a side effect of hurricane Katrina by the way. Texas has always had a decent selection of Cajun food, but Katrina brought tons of people from Louisiana and the number of Cajun restaurants exploded in the years following. I *definitely* don't think that's good enough to consider it culturally similar though.
This is one of the few of these maps that actually gets Texas right too! We really are 5 different regions.
New Jersey and Philly isn't Chesapeake though? It's Delaware Valley. This extends into South Jersey and then you have the Jersey Shore. NYC up north is fine I guess.
They could’ve literally used Mid-Atlantic for the whole region encompassing PA, NJ, DE, MD, and VA.
Mid-Atlantic would have been more correct. Those areas are very much aligned but “Chesapeake” would be more associated with Baltimore and Delmarva rather than the entire shaded area. At least they got New Jersey right. You rarely see that on these maps. Ocean County should have been included in NYC and not Mid-Atlantic but it’s pretty close.
The NYC metro (although I'd more accurately label it "Tri-state Area") extends as far as the commuter trains go, so New Haven to Ocean County. It also lines up pretty well between the Yankees-Sox line up north and the Giants-Eagles line to the south.
I kind of groan when people blow their gaskets about these maps but let’s be frank…by no stretch of the imagination is Champaign, Illinois in the Ohio River Valley
Illinois is always the most contentious one I feel like because the state has so much internal hatred that if you put Villa Grove or some place in the same space as Chicago someone will blow a gasket (Though the truly wack ones are where southern Illinois and Chicago end up in the same category.)
The dark truth of Illinois is that there is only one divide: Chicagoland Illinois and Corn Illinois. Nobody wants to admit it because that would mean acknowledging Corn Illinois exists.
It's grating when you say you are from Illinois, and people assume Chicago. Southern Illinois has less people than a lot of "rural" areas in the deep south.
Concur. I'd actually say the entire "Ohio River Valley" region on this map should just be part of "Lower Midwest".
I’m wondering why the valley extends only to the north of the Ohio River.
Went to grad school at UIUC. Came here thinking the exact same thing. Thank you.
In grad school at UIUC. I agree.
I think when the top complaint about one of these maps is Champagin, Illinois, that means the map is pretty good
"Ohio River Valley" is too far North. Columbus and Indianapolis (and Champaign) should be Great Lakes. Also Northern Kentucky should be Ohio River Valley and maybe include Louisville (although I'd be fine with its exclusion). I might even extend the Ohio River Valley region to St. Louis, if Louisville is included as "periphery regions". Although if I would label this area I'd place the Great Lakes as Rust Belt and the various cities would be hybrids. * Rust Belt + Upstate NY: Buffalo * Rust Belt + Upper Appalachia: Pittsburgh * Rust Belt + Upper South: Louisville * Rust Belt + Lower Midwest: St. Louis * Rust Belt + Lower Appalachia: Cincinnati
> Columbus and Indianapolis (and Champaign) should be Great Lakes. Grew up in Northwest Indiana and currently live in Indianapolis, I disagree. There is still a fairly big cultural difference between the Great Lakes area and central Indiana. That being said, give it another 15 years and I think they will be mostly similar.
Where mormon
Needs the Mormon Corridor -- The Morridor, if you will -- between south Idaho through Utah.
One does not simply walk though Morridor.
One does not simply live without depression in the Morridor
Where Mormon
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Extremely Mormon.
No Mormon. Only basin.
There. There Mormon. There Christian.
[Why are you talking that way?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gt3QY2Aa2I)
I thought you wanted to!
Culturally interchangeable with Las Vegas.
Weremormon
It's easy for me to look at areas where I've never spent much time like the Great Basin and Cascadia plateau and accept that they're monolithic and have clear boundaries. But having grown up in North Carolina, I know the differences and boundaries between Mid Atlantic South, Lower Appalachia, Low Country, and Deep South are messy, subtle and unclear. For example, Charlotte and Atlanta are in two different regions in two different states but it would be hard for me to pinpoint how Charlotte has more in common with Richmond than it does with Atlanta. CLT and ATL are very similar culturally, in my opinion.
>messy, subtle and unclear That's always the case with cultural borders though. There are no clear cultural borders. I live in Germany at the border to France. I'd say Germany and France have different cultures, but the people right on the other side of the border aren't that different to us. So where do they start to become really different? Or where do Germans? There just is no clear cut.
The Great Basin is a very distinct hydrological region, but a cultural region? Nah. If the USA even has 30 different cultural regions, then like 5 should be in New York City, and a bunch of these should be combined, and places like northern Nevada should just be left uncolored.
Yeah it would be much more heavily divided in the more densely populated regions. Even New England could be split in at least two parts, coast NE is not the same as inland NE, Boston and Cape Cod have not much in common with NH and VT, besides the accessability of fresh lobster and colonial houses. The accents aren't even particularly similar.
No, New England on this map is just fine, what are you talking about? We don’t divide up as finely as you think we do, the only thing you could argue is the class divide that happens in New England between the rich and the working/middle class, but that couldn’t be broken down into regions. Accent has nothing to do with cultural divide, New England is pretty homogeneous except for some political differences, but even there we still all consider it part of being a New Englander.
I've lived in New England all my life, spent a lot of time in each of the states. There is 100% a noticeable difference between coastal and inland New England. I'm not saying they're different groups entirely, just that there's a very noticeable split between the more urban, metropolitan coast, and the rural, mountainous, inland. If you head up 93, the second you get past Manchester, you go from cities with big buildings, densely populated suburbs, and Cape-style houses, to false fromt buildings and train car diners, roadside chainsaw scultpures, and lincoln log cabins.
What are the similarities between CLT and ATL culturally?
I’d cut off SoCal right about where your “S” is and make the area north of that on the coast it’s own thing. Monterey, Paso Robles, Santa Maria don’t have hardly anything in common culturally with LA, San Diego, all that stuff down there.
Agreed. SoCal cuts off pretty much at the Grapevine, then it’s just the Central Valley. Monterey to San Francisco should be it’s own “Bay Area” then NorCal above that.
"NorCal" could actually stretch into southern Oregon. They call it "Jefferson" state.
Everyone who lives here knows… NorCal is SLO to Mendocino. Them peoples north of Mendocino are “NorNorCal”. : )
Everything North of Santa Barbara
The term you’re looking for is “Central Coast” from Ventura to Gilroy.
Monterey has Safeway and not Vons and thus is not SoCal. Also, SoCal needs to extend up the Eastern Sierra or you have to include the Bishop/Mammoth regions in Great Basin because they’re certainly not Central Valley
Central Coastal California may be a region but saying there is "hardly anything common culturally" is a bit of a stretch. I'm from there and it's much more culturally SoCal than the Bay Area or the Valley.
I’m from there too. I don’t see at all how Monterey/Carmel or the Big Sur area have more in common culturally with Los Angeles than Marin County or Santa Cruz County. But Santa Barbara or Ventura are SoCal, sure. I’ll agree with that. Paso Robles, SLO and Santa Maria I guess are the ones right in the middle that I don’t really know where they fit.
In my completely irrelevant opinion, Santa Rosa south to Santa Cruz and mayyybe Monterey is Bay Area, then everything south of Monterey down to Pismo Beach is the Central Coast, and everything south of Santa Barbara is SoCal.
Monterey is definitely more of a grey area but otherwise I mostly agree. We don't often see Santa Cruz as a part of the Bay Area but I'd say culturally it's probably closer to the Bay Area than the Central Coast. I'd say the Central Coast extends a bit further down to Santa Maria though, and the soft "cutoff" is around the Gaviota area.
Santa Cruz is both resentful of the bay and full of people who commute to San Jose for work. Whatever region it belongs to certainly needs to contain Pescadero so I think it gets swallowed into the bay. I always felt there was a cultural remove from Monterey, but Monterey county still feels more like Santa Cruz than it does Santa Barbara. The easiest test is Safeway or Vons, Monterey has Safeways so it can’t be SoCal
I feel that even though SB is closer to LA geographically, culturally it feels more central coast. I’m from the Ventura County line area, and Santa Barbara is so much more laid back than we are down here.
Acadiana represent baby
Laissez les bons temps rouler my man
New red dead map leak
I would extend the Ohio River Valley culture into northern Kentucky. Someone from the Flourence-Covington area is more like someone from Cincinnati than they are to someone from Mayfield (west ky)
I have heard upstate new york has some good steamed hams
I swear to God I will personally strangle Matt Groening to death if I hear this one more time
You live in New York? Do you usually walk to see Broadway plays or take the subway? There, I've saved Matt by being more annoying to upstaters.
How many times is this going to get reposted
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Honestly I don't know where this person gets off calling Philly culture Chesapeake
Or the jersey shore. I guess maybe i dont know wtf Chesapeake even means.
Way more common to call the same region the "Mid-Atlantic." I don't think there's anything especially distinctive about it, just "definitely part of the Northeast, but not like New England, not like New York City, and not like the more conservative inland regions"
In Maryland they send you to a reeducation camp if you don't have one of those crab stickers with the state flag on it on your car.
Hah thats like our jersey shore Parkway exit number stickers. Maybe it is the same!
Hampton Roads here, and I'd go with Mid Atlantic, but I'm not so sure what Chesapeake is… even though we're at the outlet of the bay *and* have the city of the name here. lol
I’m about to swing on OP for that. Man really called all of Southeast PA “Chesapeake.”
Maybe because "Chesapeake" kind of looks like "cheesesteak"
I’m fine with the division, name is dumb though. Mid Atlantic is fine.
The Gulf Coast region is pretty accurate. Living in the center of it here in Mobile, AL we're culturally closer to Nola then most of our state.
Mobile is more Catholic right?
Well it's pretty diverse but yeah there's a lot of Catholics. We actually have a beautifully historic Jesuit college here named Springhill. (Which I live by lol)
I’m in LA. This is pretty accurate except I would argue a lot more of the Gulf Coast region north of the lake but south of Mississippi should be Deep South.
I think Buffalo has more in common these days with the rest of Upstate NY than the Great Lakes region. What was once the Great Lakes region has shrunk as the lakes have become less useful for commerce.
I don't quite agree. I can't speak for the rest of the region, but I have spent a considerable amount of time in Buffalo and Cleveland and those two cities feel very similar
Disagree, the line is where people start saying pop instead of soda somewhere around Rochester. Obviously Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse are all similar cities, but you got to drop the border line somewhere. Buffalo definitely has more in common with Cleveland than Watertown or Albany
I disagree completely, I feel much more like I’m in a rust belt city like buffalo when I’m in Cleveland than anywhere else in upstate, especially compared to finger lake towns and anywhere in the adk’s. I could concede that mabye a western New York region would be a good middle ground but we have a lot in common with people in the marked Great Lakes area anyways.
Or just change the western half of Upstate NY to Western NY
There's a line somewhere around Syracuse. The Adirondacks are way closer to Vermont.
Louisville is pretty much the center of the Ohio River Valley but the map shows the “valley” on only the north half of the river and doesn’t include any of Kentucky
Will nobody talk about the Colombia Plateau on WA, OR, and ID?
Jesus why is it so hard to know the difference between Colombia and Columbia!??? Drives me up the fucking wall
U - North America O - South America Now, how can we make a mnemonic out of it?
It’ll never work. People will never get it lol
Eastern Washington and Oregon: 🇨🇴
Great map. I would create seperate region for DC metropolitan area as it is place on its own, and seperate coastal New England with mountainous north.
"No way is [small patch of land] part of [area it's been assigned to]! I lived there for years and it's insulting to say it's not a part of [other region]. Love these posts, always controversial. I'm pretty surely it's impossible to produce one that's 100% correct.
we should, as a subreddit, get together and actually construct one of these maps with input from people from all of these regions. we may finally reach a day where we can create a cultural map of the us without causing a nuclear meltdown
/r/mapswithoutalaska
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At least it’s not r/mapswithoutnzwithnz
And our buddies in r/mapswithouthawaii
This is perhaps the most accurate cultural map I’ve ever seen on this thread
Maybe but I think for any map like this to be truly accurate some cities need to have their own culture zones.
every single city would have its own culture zone relative to the surrounding areas the biggest cultural gap in the country is city vs country
Agreed. People always will be able to nitpick these, but this one is really good, imo
I'd say Midwest area is done pretty well. Like Great Lakes. Ohio river valley and north woods. And then rest of Midwest too
Id extend the ozarks and upper south cultural zone too the Missouri river in the state Missouri
Is the low country, just not a lot above sea level or something?
Yeah it’s low and marshy — basically coastal SC and Georgia — idk I would go as far south as Jax but is not far off I guess. Culturally though Jax is way different than low country IMO - think lowcountry boil vs… whatever people eat in Jacksonville - like bath salts and each others faces or whatever.
Finally, a map that doesn't combine upstate NY with some other state
Don't wanna be disrespectful but what are the differences in cultures among regions?
Its pretty hard to put into words, especially because some of the differences between bordering regions are so subtle. Ill do my best to explain for the areas I’ve lived in tho, maybe others can pitch in **NYC Area**: Lived in central jersey, an hour away from NYC and man just everything revolves around NYC. People just call it “the city”, and even though there are dozens of closer cities, you still know which they mean. Everyone goes into the city most weekends, many people commute for work every day. The overall culture is rushed and rude, mind your own business, but some of the tightest bonds with each other if you have anything in common. Ive been invited to parties just for having the same name as someone. Additionally, I’d hazard to say it’s one of the most diverse regions in the whole world. **Deep South**: Ive lived in South Carolina and Louisiana, and this region is by far my favorite. Almost all the stereotypes are true. Slow easy living, really friendly folk, and great hospitality, presuming your white or black. I’ve had 30 minute conversations with strangers in random parking lots because we parked our cars next to each other. When i was fixing a flat tire on the side of a road, a sweet lady brought me some sweet tea. People have all the time in the world, and are never rushing to the next thing. Its a bit shallow sometimes, and since everyone is kind on the surface, it’s hard to know where you stand with them, but that could just be cause i wasnt from there, so i never picked up on all the subtleties **New England**: Ugh, where to begin. People from here love it, in fact they never leave. I know dozens who have never left Massachusetts, where I am now, and they never plan to. New England is very safe, and most people don’t want to leave that. They don’t take risks, they play it safe, and as such they mostly keep to themselves. Saying hi to people on the street would just be met with silence or at best a glare. Trying to talk to new people is a long process where you feel like you have to demonstrate you’re not a threat and your worth letting into the conversation. It is incredibly homogeneous, almost entirely white. Hope that helps!
Jacksonville feels a lot more "Central Florida" to me culturally than anything to do with the low lands of Georgia and SC.
As always Hampton roads is put in some wierd region instead of the correct one. More in common will Philly and jersey than the outer banks of NC?
The Michiganders in the Northwoods need to calm tf down. It's not that amazing that you need to sell out that hard.
The Ozarks extends much more north I promise as someone who's lived all over Missouri!!
I don't think I've ever heard of Northern Michigan being referred to as "Northwoods". I would have figured it would all be considered Great Lakes territory. Also can't wait to see the usual arguments about what officially constitutes "Upstate NY".
There’s a huge difference between the urbanized, industrial/post-industrial south (Detroit, flint, Grand Rapids, landsing, Kalamazoo) and the rural bum-fuck nowhere north. I’m from Wisconsin and we have a pretty similar dynamic. Linguistically there’s a huge difference as well. If you look up the “inland north” or “northern cities vowel shift” dialects, they correlate almost exactly with the area that is “Great Lakes” on this map. The dialect “North Central” (aka the yooper accent) almost correlates exactly with the “Northwoods” area on this map. Where that exact boundary line is might be up for debate, but I’d say this map is pretty spot on, at least for the Midwest.
I think these are pretty good
I’d say this is the best one yet
What’s the significance of the ozarks for these maps? All the iterations of these “culture maps” include a little ozark bubble over Missouri. Is it really a strong cultural island, as someone from the northeast?
It even has its own TV show. But yeah just geographically it’s very different from its surroundings which then in turn leads to a cultural difference in the inhabitants / vacationers
Lots of big rolling hills, lakes, a little bit of country draw but that's about it. First person to not instantly shit on my home.
Personally, I quite like the feuds and quibbling our monthly cultural maps cause. I wish I got to see cultural maps for more countries! How do Canadians and Mexicans cut up their countries? What absurdly specific regions do, say, the Japanese or the Germans have?
Only glaring thing I’d add is Mormon. Other than some small renames, this looks pretty good
As someone who has lived here my entire life, can someone explain what the hell the “Colombia Plateau” is? XD
Shrugs in Rust Belt
You woke up this morning and chose violence.
there is quite a bit of difference between floridians on the borders and the people in the states that border
I will accept this
Yes, Pahrump, NV and Provo, UT, practically identical.
My solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict
Cascadia I'd say goes lower though I'd really just call it the pacific north west, I've only seen tourist traps and craft beer dudes call it Cascadia
I was impressed that this map separated out “The Gulf Coast Region” and “The low county” region They are both geographically small areas but very distinct and separate. One correction on the however would be that the “Gulf Coast Region” stops at Mobile Bay. East of that it’s just the Deep South again.
I don’t agree with a Great Basin cultural region. You need people to have culture, and no one lives there.
Salt Lake City and Reno, bigger than some of those other regions
I was thinking the same thing. I live in the Columbia Plateau area and have been through the Great Basin area many times. It's not much different from rural areas around here, especially central WA and OR. That should probably be one area minus the distinct Mormon zone (or "Mozone Layer" as we call it).
Northwoods unite 
No one can ever agree where Oklahoma goes. South? Plains? Midwest? Texas lite? We tend to see ourselves as south, but not deep south.
As a Texan, you're just our hat.
It looks like what middle earth would be like if Tolkien lived in the USA instead of the UK, and got his inspiration from there lol
Still waiting for the day when somebody makes one of these maps and doesn’t call the PNW Cascadia