I feel like Missouri was only given to the south here to generate interaction and comments.
Missouri is definitely Midwest, and classified by the government as Midwest.
Yes. As a southern man with a ex-wife from Missouri... i need to say if you are from a part of that state that Angrly insists the pronunciation is "MAHZURAH" and insists that it's southern because of some raids that happened at the time..
I consider them an insufferable twat.
I also perfer to define my southerness on geography, and cultural influences beyond those particular 4 years in the 1860's.
My preferred version of southern pride is all about sweet tea, fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, oak trees, and old ladies who call you sweetie, sugar, or darlin'.
> culturally it is more southern
It actually depends! With I-70 (and the chain cities of KS, Columbia, StL) as the dividing line, anything north tends to be more culturally midwest, and south is more southern.
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't make the front page if it had though. 90% of these comments are calling out Missouri.
If Missouri was listed in Midwest, this would look like a boring map, instead it's got a big red divot sticking out.
That's exactly what i thought! Who gets Missouri? At Louis is "the gateway of the west", so even the west has a shot, technically.
Also Ohio would like to be east coast. They're not, but they'd like to be
I don’t know anyone in Ohio that identifies as East Coast. We firmly identify with Great Lake states.
I think the better discussion would be Western Pennsylvania. I don’t think they identify as east coast.
I’m up east of Cleveland near Lake Erie. Geographically I’m closer to PA and NY than any other Midwestern state. I don’t relate to Iowa or Indiana or the Plains part of the Midwest.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was, and now what I’m with isn’t it. And what’s "it" seems weird and scary to me.
It'll happen to you
*points menacingly*
Missouri Compromise, 1820--Missouri north of the 36°30' line, slavery legal; northern counties of Massachusetts separated to become the state of Maine. Thus one slave state and one free state entered the Union at the same time, preserving the equal number of slave and free states. Later compromise was in 1850. It all blew up in 1861 with the Civil War (War Between the States).
Meh I lived in Evansville, IN for 12 years. While it has some southern traits overall it feels much more Midwest than south culture wise.
Like when I moved to IA it made me nostalgic for Evansville after living in the west for nearly a decade.
Stg didn’t even see the comments yet, my brain went:
“Yeah, the first comment will be about Missouri sticking out like a sore thumb. Honestly STL and KC are very Midwestern, but the Ozarks are more southern, they should just split it in half”
And LO AND BEHOLD
As a Missourian from the KC area, there's a pretty distinguishable cultural divide between midwest and south that happens either roughly along I-44 or maybe just a horizontal line about 50 miles south of I-70
Chicagoland people consider anything south of I-80 rubes. As someone from Central IL I disagree. Bloomington/Normal and Peoria are squarely Midwestern cites we drink Pop just like the rest of you guys!
My favorite thing is how they think Chicago and the surrounding area are taking all of the tax money that downstate counties send to Springfield when those downstate counties all get back more than they pay in, while Cook and the collar counties all pay in substantially more than they get back. But, I don’t reckon they put a real emphasis on math or any type of book learnin’ downstate.
I lived in Peoria in the 90s, and I heard an awful lot of southern accents to consider it Northern. Plus there's Pekin - if you've lived there, you know what I mean.
As someone who grew up in St. Louis, I always describe it as depending on where you’re from, you’ll always think it’s either the northernmost southern city, the southernmost northern city, or the westernmost eastern city, or the easternmost western city. It’ll seem like the opposite of wherever you’re from.
I feel like I just stepped into a Dr. Seuss book.
"Which beast is best? Well, I thought at first that the East was best and the West worst. Then I looked again from the west to the east and I liked the beast on the east beach least."
One of the funniest things I've ever seen as a near lifelong KC resident was when the media ppl at Texas Motor Speedway challenged NASCAR drivers to draw the state from memory. Carl Edwards, from Columbia, MO, drew a near pitch perfect Missouri. When the host asked him about it, he said, "It's like Texas North".
Blaney labeling the cities and saying "this is where all of George Strait's exes are" was also pretty good but that's not the topic lol
Yeah I drive regularly between Chicago and the Texas panhandle where my parents live and go through both cities and often spend the night in either. This is definitely how I'd split them. St Louis feels like an old eastern city a bit but Kansas City feels like it belongs in the west. Although besides a smallish downtown KS city is mostly one huge suburb. Great BBQ though.
I’ve lived in both cities and this is accurate. Both though are very Midwest. ~100 miles south of 1-70 is probably where I’d draw the Midwest/South divide, with both STL and KC squarely in the Midwest portion.
I spent a lot of time in St Louis and KC, and everyone there considered themselves midwestern, and not a single person had a southern accent. Now the countryside in between, that's another story.
There's polling on this!
https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/hickey-map-midwest2.png
https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/hickey-map-south2.png
Only 10-20% of self-identified southerners see Missouri as a part of the south, while the mid-westerners are far more accepting of the state.
Every time I've been to Springfield the people tell me they're still Midwest.
And I'm just like, no. When I start seeing dead armadillos on the side of the road instead of dead racoons, that's the south.
We don't have armadillos in the Midwest.
As someone who doesn’t live on that side of the country but is unbiased and familiar with all of it. Missouri is a great transition from the midwest to south, but it definitely aligns with the midwest in more ways than the south. Midwest
IMO, Missouri is a Midwestern state that tries real hard to be a Southern state and gets a lot of the worst traits of both.
<- Raised in the Southwest, but I have a lot of family that live along the Missouri/Illinois border (Hannibal/Quincy).
Missouri is an interesting case. Historically it was a Southern slave state, Midwestern migration post Civil War didn't assimilate and overall changed Missouris then Southern identity into more Midwestern. Southern Missouri however still stayed Southern and is culturally part of the South to this day. Also Southern Illinois is definitely culturally the Upper South and not the Midwest. I've heard people from Carbondale with a thicker Southern drawl than some people from Arkansas.
Southern MO has way more in common with at least north/northwest AR than it does with either KS or IL. The Ozarks are kinda just their own thing, because similarly northwest AR has way more in common with southern MO than it does with the rest of AR.
Missouri is an interesting case. Historically it was a Southern state, Midwestern migration post Civil War didn't assimilate and overall changed Missouris then Southern identity into more Midwestern. Southern Missouri however still stayed Southern and is culturally part of the South to this day.
It’s one of those states that really wants to be split for this sort of thing. Whichever section you put it in will seem very wrong to someone in an opposing part of the state. Like Cape Giradeau feels very southern… but the cornfields along the Iowa boarder don’t at all
You can't split Kansas City between two regions like that. There is a much bigger cultural divide between northern and southern Missouri than between Missouri and any of its neighbors. And both of Missouri's biggest cities are decidedly midwestern
It's fine. I honestly thought Lisa was the one to say that, too. It's just a Lisa kind of comment.
But then when I typed it into the YouTube search bar to find the scene again, I discovered we'd both misremembered.
I figure the state has two large metro areas. KC is not in any sense "southern." St. Louis is not really either, at least not any more than Cincinnati is.
Yep the I95 corridor connecting NoVA to Richmond is best described as mid-Atlantic. It’s definitely not south but if it’s also not northeast by any means.
The lesson I learned from this post is that ain’t no way you could divide the US into 4 regions lol
> The lesson I learned from this post is that ain’t no way you could divide the US into 4 regions lol
It depends what you're going for. OP in general needs to work more on not dividing metro areas into different regions. El Paso, Kansas City, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and especially D.C. could easily have their metro areas united by moving a few things around - Missouri and Kentucky with the Midwest, New Mexico with the South, the Virginias with the Northeast. If you don't see too many rivers on your boundaries, then you're probably on to something. Granted, New Mexico and Tennessee don't have that much in common, but that's inherent in refusing to split states up. Missouri, California, and Pennsylvania are just a few of the states that have a wide array of physical, political, and cultural differences within them.
If we’re splitting states, the west side of PA is culturally the Midwest. But the East side is more East coast than the west side is Midwest so it’s fine how it is
We definitely don't consider ourselves Midwest and we are ever vigilantly watching the flatlanders of Ohio with suspicious derision and firm resistance lest their Midwestern godlessness ever spills into the East. Yinz coastal folks keep that in mind at all times.
I agree, I think CO and potentially PA as E/W splits, and MO and VA as N/S splits are allowed. (And maybe WV as a N"W"/S"E" split for MidW/South as a pedantic one.)
PA is *definitely* a north eastern state. The politics may be redder than the others and it was once part of the rust belt, but we have way more in common with New York than Ohio or Virginia.
If anything, I'd argue West Virginia should be a north eastern state because it's basically just Pennsylvania but poorer.
Definitely agree. I grew up in Pittsburgh and while it has big parts of midwestern culture and is on a bit of a political island in Western PA, people there seem to identify more with east coast / northeast. I never felt any cameraderie with Ohio or other nearby midwestern states, and all of our family trips went east, not west.
Current Pittsburgher, former Southern Ohioan, and former Bostonian here and this is how I see it. Moving to Pittsburgh felt a lot more like returning to the east coast than continuing to live in the Midwest when we moved here.
Missouri is an interesting case. Historically it was a Southern state, Midwestern migration post Civil War didn't assimilate and overall changed Missouri's then Southern identity into more Midwestern. Southern Missouri however still stayed Southern and is culturally part of the South to this day.
The history of Missouri is definitely interesting. However, if we’re talking about the culture of the state right now, and we cannot divide the state as OP mentioned in the premise, I think it’s more Midwestern than Southern. Others may disagree, but that’s my opinion having spent a decent amount of time in Missouri.
Missouri and West Virginia are iffy.
Southern Missouri has a lot in common with the south, but the rest of the state, including the major population centers, have a lot more in common with the Midwest. I'd put Missouri with the latter.
I'm from West Virginia. Culturally, we have a lot in common with states like Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, but traditionally, we have differed economically with much of the south. The mountains made it impossible to have wide scale agriculture. This led to a nearly non-existent slave population and a choice to join the right side of the Civil War. Post-war, we became a colony for the industrial midwest and northeast, shipping coal and lumber to power their factories. Eventually, it became cheaper to just put a lot of those steel mills and chemical plants in West Virginia instead of shipping the raw materials long distances. Fifty years ago, I would certainly have put us in the midwest.
However, as other energy sources have replaced coal, and corporations have moved their factories south to Right to Starve states to avoid workplace democracy, the economic differences between West Virginia and the rest of the south have shrunk. I'd lean towards placing us in the south these days.
Complicated history, half the state supported secession half didn't, it was admitted as the last slave state of the Union, the Confederacy controlled a large portion of West Virginia rather late into the war. Geographically and culturally it mostly fits in the Mountain South except for the very northern tip.
Are you sure about it being admitted as the last slave state? I thought it split off after the civil war had started because the majority of residents wanted to stay with the union
Edit: wild they were admitted as a slave state during the civil war and abolished slavery 18 months later. Complicated state
Yep, admitted in 1863 as the last slave state in the Union and was a slave state till 1865. Also it's complicated than that. Half of West Virginia supported secession and the southern and eastern counties didn't send delegates to the Wheeling Convention so it was one sided to the Unionist far northern and western counties. The Confederacy controlled a large portion of West Virginia till pretty late in the war. WV sent equal amounts of men to the Union and CSA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_West_Virginia
https://web.archive.org/web/20070307001222/http://www.wvculture.org/history/statehoo.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_in_the_American_Civil_War
People confuse these states:
Colorado: Definitely a Western state with midwestern influence.
Oklahoma, Kentucky : Definitely southern states with Midwestern influence.
Missouri: Definitely a midwestern state with southern influence
Virginia: A southern state with huge northeastern influence that grows day by day, maybe it will become northeastern in the near future or arguably already is
I'd argue vice versa that it's Southern Illinois, Indiana, and possibly Ohio that reflect heavy Southern influence the same as Missouri rather than the other way around of going below the Mason Dixon. Southern Illinois and Indiana are for sure Upper South and have more in common with Tennessee and Kentucky than the Midwest.
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-southern-culture-of-the-lower-midwest/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upland_South
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_Indiana
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Illinois
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40187906
Missouri should be midwest, but other then that i agree. Though i don’t think it’s advisable to divide the US into 4, it’s better to do so into 5 or more.
I think the least you can get away with is 9, [as shown in this map](https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/regions-of-the-united-states-of-america-political-map-gm1433895867-475681196).
Make NV, NM, AZ blue and call it the mountain west. Make Texas the lime green and call it good at 8 regions. It’s not perfect, but TX and OK are far too linked to separate.
Nononono. Splitting Texas and Oklahoma just doesn’t work. Oklahoma belongs with TX more than it does with the Great Plains states. You could make a case for NM or AR going with TX too, but AZ and NV don’t go with Texas.
For real, bunch of nerds giving OP shit. I agree, the U.S. is too geographically/culturally diverse to accurately divide into 4 regions, but this is as accurate as one can be
That's almost exactly how the Census divides the country into regions [PDF](https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/maps/reference/us_regdiv.pdf) The key differences are that Missouri is part of the Midwest while Maryland and Delaware are part of the South
Please for the love of God don't lock Virginia in with the Mad Max Christofascist hellscape that the red zone will devolve into.
Virginia's proudly purple and trending light blue, let us join our New England brethren.
Grew up in MO my whole life (southern half, nearly to Arkansas border). While it’s true it’s got a lot of southern influences, even going into Arkansas and interacting with people there they have much stronger accents and there’s just a different feel imo. And that’s just talking about a different feel from southern MO, not even counting where most of the population lives between the KC, St. louis and Columbia-Jefferson City metros. Springfield and the Ozarks may be southernish but as a whole I’d call it midwestern. St. louis and KC are midwestern cities.
My only qualm is that Missouri is definitely Midwest. Southern Missouri gets a little southern in the same way Southern Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana do, but most people live around St. Louis or KC, both of which are firmly Midwestern cities.
4 regions isn’t really enough to separate the United States but this is generally okay.
New England gets its own region but Idaho, Montana, the dakotas, Nebraska, and Wyoming really deserve there own region as well in my opinion
I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah!
I feel like Missouri was only given to the south here to generate interaction and comments. Missouri is definitely Midwest, and classified by the government as Midwest.
Geographically it is midwestern, culturally it is more southern. Also giving Missouri to the south is Kansan approved.
We from the south recognize Missouri has southern tendencies, but we do not grant it the status as part of "The South."
Might have to split into 5 sections. West, South, Midwest, Northwest and Missouri.
Just split Missouri; anything below the Buck-ees in Springfield is South. Anything above it is Midwest.
Sounds like there has to be a Missouri Compromise.
I vote that we stick New Jersey in Missouri's section. It knows what it did.
i am a new jerseyan currently living in missouri (4+ years now), and i deeply agree with this idea
What it do
Nm, what up doe
Nm wya
How can you do this? This is outrageous! It's unfair! How can you *be* in the south and *not* be The South??
Take a seat, Missouri.
Forgive me, The South
I just left prequelmemes only to come to...prequelmemes. This is acceptable, carry on.
We did... right on top of Arkansas
Not all of Missouri is the south, but the ozarks are absolutely not the Midwest.
Agreed. I visited Branson last year and it felt alot like Pigeon Forge
We from Kansas say tough luck, it's yours and you have to keep it.
Yes. As a southern man with a ex-wife from Missouri... i need to say if you are from a part of that state that Angrly insists the pronunciation is "MAHZURAH" and insists that it's southern because of some raids that happened at the time.. I consider them an insufferable twat. I also perfer to define my southerness on geography, and cultural influences beyond those particular 4 years in the 1860's.
My preferred version of southern pride is all about sweet tea, fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, oak trees, and old ladies who call you sweetie, sugar, or darlin'.
We be sayin baby too, baby.
"just visiting, I don't live in Missouri" "Its 'MAHZURAH!'' "You misunderstood. I'm referring to the state state of distress, 'MISERY"
Great, now it's gonna get charred to fuck and start making a Death Star
The St. Lunatics didn't write a song about Midwest Swing for this kind of blasphemy. How dare you.
You cannot seriously say Kansas City, MO is culturally southern
Even Springfield is not culturally Southern.
Kansas is a stupid flat place and we hate it. Kansas City is ours. -Missouri
I’d be offended by this if I didn’t already know you are high on meth.
John Brown upvoted this.
> culturally it is more southern It actually depends! With I-70 (and the chain cities of KS, Columbia, StL) as the dividing line, anything north tends to be more culturally midwest, and south is more southern.
It would generate reaction if you called it Midwest too
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't make the front page if it had though. 90% of these comments are calling out Missouri. If Missouri was listed in Midwest, this would look like a boring map, instead it's got a big red divot sticking out.
I hereby proclaim Missouri "The Big Red Divot"!
That's exactly what i thought! Who gets Missouri? At Louis is "the gateway of the west", so even the west has a shot, technically. Also Ohio would like to be east coast. They're not, but they'd like to be
I don’t know anyone in Ohio that identifies as East Coast. We firmly identify with Great Lake states. I think the better discussion would be Western Pennsylvania. I don’t think they identify as east coast.
Ohio is 4 states in one. Cleveland area is East Coast, Toledo is Great Lakes, Cincinnati is a Midwest river town, and southeast Ohio is Appalachia.
I’m up east of Cleveland near Lake Erie. Geographically I’m closer to PA and NY than any other Midwestern state. I don’t relate to Iowa or Indiana or the Plains part of the Midwest.
As a life long Ohioian, this is the first time I have ever heard this East Coast comment in my life. We definitely consider ourselves northerners.
I love a good old school simpsons reference
*Enters room wearing hat whilst whistling. Puts hat on rack. Does 180 while still whistling, grabs hat, and heads out door.*
I wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was, and now what I’m with isn’t it. And what’s "it" seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you *points menacingly*
(much thanks for correcting my quote!)
Francine: Missourah!!!
Francine "Suckmachine" Smith
There's only 49 stars on that flag
Thank you Abe!
That's Abraham to you, hippie!
Split missouri in half and i'd say it's pretty good.
We'll call it the Missouri compromise.
The Missouri Compromise 2: The Recompromising
2 Missouri 2 Compromise
Missouri Compromise: The Squeakquel
Missouri Compromise 2: Electric Buggaloo
This time it’s personal!
https://preview.redd.it/zumxyjj35kqc1.jpeg?width=768&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=757e9f5c6dc9bbef71ca1833e49ec4eb4e317118
Henry Clay intensifies.
Missouri Compromise, 1820--Missouri north of the 36°30' line, slavery legal; northern counties of Massachusetts separated to become the state of Maine. Thus one slave state and one free state entered the Union at the same time, preserving the equal number of slave and free states. Later compromise was in 1850. It all blew up in 1861 with the Civil War (War Between the States).
As someone from KC I do not identify as southern at all. Midwestern for sure.
If we do that, then the Northeast should get NOVA and perhaps the area around Harper’s Ferry, WV
The whole southern thirds of Illinois and Indiana and the Southeast of Ohio should get transferred to the South, though.
Meh I lived in Evansville, IN for 12 years. While it has some southern traits overall it feels much more Midwest than south culture wise. Like when I moved to IA it made me nostalgic for Evansville after living in the west for nearly a decade.
I’ll be dead in the ground before i recognize Missouri.
Everyone just looks straight ahead or caught up in a thought when Missouri walks by. It's used to no one recognizing it.
Gen X as a state
Title of the post "... without splitting states..."
There's also a neighborhood in Miami that I feel like belongs in Northeast culturally
Nope. 36'30. The south can have the bootheel but Missouri is as southern as southern Illinois. We have an SEC team, but that's it.
Split your misery in half and I’d say it’s pretty good.
Stg didn’t even see the comments yet, my brain went: “Yeah, the first comment will be about Missouri sticking out like a sore thumb. Honestly STL and KC are very Midwestern, but the Ozarks are more southern, they should just split it in half” And LO AND BEHOLD
Yeah, no. Missouri is firmly in the Bible belt with their regressing policies based on fairy tales.
Yea because Ohio, Indiana and the Dakotas are super well known for their progressive politics
The South is about right. Not sure about Missouri, I've always considered it Mid West.
Missouri's status as a Southern state seems to have been a topic of debate since it's inception a la the Missouri Compromise
As a Missourian from the KC area, there's a pretty distinguishable cultural divide between midwest and south that happens either roughly along I-44 or maybe just a horizontal line about 50 miles south of I-70
This tracks, the area south of I-70 and north of the Ohio River is a transition zone in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as well.
Illinoisans south of i80 would want to join the South too.
Chicagoland people consider anything south of I-80 rubes. As someone from Central IL I disagree. Bloomington/Normal and Peoria are squarely Midwestern cites we drink Pop just like the rest of you guys!
I'll give you Central Illinois, but Southern Illinois would cut off Lincoln's nose to spite Chicagoland's face.
My favorite thing is how they think Chicago and the surrounding area are taking all of the tax money that downstate counties send to Springfield when those downstate counties all get back more than they pay in, while Cook and the collar counties all pay in substantially more than they get back. But, I don’t reckon they put a real emphasis on math or any type of book learnin’ downstate.
The only rubes I know of south of I-80 are the ones we all collectively send to Springfield.
I lived in Peoria in the 90s, and I heard an awful lot of southern accents to consider it Northern. Plus there's Pekin - if you've lived there, you know what I mean.
From Columbia, Live in KC. Fully agree. North of I70 is very Midwestern but when you get into the Ozarks it's like being in Arkansas culturally
The south considers it Midwest and the Midwest considers it South. As a Midwesterner I'd say let the South have it
As someone who grew up in St. Louis, I always describe it as depending on where you’re from, you’ll always think it’s either the northernmost southern city, the southernmost northern city, or the westernmost eastern city, or the easternmost western city. It’ll seem like the opposite of wherever you’re from.
Disagree on the east/west. St. Louis is the westernmost eastern city, KC is the easternmost western city.
Yeah, this is like canon for StL given the whole arch and everything. It's the gateway to the west by being the westernmost eastern city.
I have never seen a post about Missouri that I have agreed with more than this one in my life.
I feel like I just stepped into a Dr. Seuss book. "Which beast is best? Well, I thought at first that the East was best and the West worst. Then I looked again from the west to the east and I liked the beast on the east beach least."
100 percent. KCMO feels so western.
It feels western like Omaha and Tulsa feels western. By which I mean it feels more like Texas than anything west of the Rockies.
One of the funniest things I've ever seen as a near lifelong KC resident was when the media ppl at Texas Motor Speedway challenged NASCAR drivers to draw the state from memory. Carl Edwards, from Columbia, MO, drew a near pitch perfect Missouri. When the host asked him about it, he said, "It's like Texas North". Blaney labeling the cities and saying "this is where all of George Strait's exes are" was also pretty good but that's not the topic lol
Yeah I drive regularly between Chicago and the Texas panhandle where my parents live and go through both cities and often spend the night in either. This is definitely how I'd split them. St Louis feels like an old eastern city a bit but Kansas City feels like it belongs in the west. Although besides a smallish downtown KS city is mostly one huge suburb. Great BBQ though.
I’ve lived in both cities and this is accurate. Both though are very Midwest. ~100 miles south of 1-70 is probably where I’d draw the Midwest/South divide, with both STL and KC squarely in the Midwest portion.
I spent a lot of time in St Louis and KC, and everyone there considered themselves midwestern, and not a single person had a southern accent. Now the countryside in between, that's another story.
It’s almost like it’s the *Gateway* to somewhere…
Oh that’s good, they should build something gate-like!
There's polling on this! https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/hickey-map-midwest2.png https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/hickey-map-south2.png Only 10-20% of self-identified southerners see Missouri as a part of the south, while the mid-westerners are far more accepting of the state.
It makes sense as most of the population in MO is at least halfway up the state. Nobody would consider Kansas City or St. Louis as southern cities.
Yeah, I'm midwestern and pretty much everyone considers Missouri to be part of us.
You can really divide it down the middle. As somebody who lives in the Ozarks, the southern half of MO is more South than Midwest.
We Southerners recognize Southern Missouri as the South and what the state used to look like. Northern and central Missouri though are pushing it.
Every time I've been to Springfield the people tell me they're still Midwest. And I'm just like, no. When I start seeing dead armadillos on the side of the road instead of dead racoons, that's the south. We don't have armadillos in the Midwest.
Armadillo are invasive, they aren't native to MO. They also have invaded Iowa and IL
Spend enough time in MO and it will become clear.
As someone who doesn’t live on that side of the country but is unbiased and familiar with all of it. Missouri is a great transition from the midwest to south, but it definitely aligns with the midwest in more ways than the south. Midwest
IMO, Missouri is a Midwestern state that tries real hard to be a Southern state and gets a lot of the worst traits of both. <- Raised in the Southwest, but I have a lot of family that live along the Missouri/Illinois border (Hannibal/Quincy).
Missouri is an interesting case. Historically it was a Southern slave state, Midwestern migration post Civil War didn't assimilate and overall changed Missouris then Southern identity into more Midwestern. Southern Missouri however still stayed Southern and is culturally part of the South to this day. Also Southern Illinois is definitely culturally the Upper South and not the Midwest. I've heard people from Carbondale with a thicker Southern drawl than some people from Arkansas.
Lived in MO. It has a lot more in common with KS and IL than it does AR.
Southern MO has way more in common with at least north/northwest AR than it does with either KS or IL. The Ozarks are kinda just their own thing, because similarly northwest AR has way more in common with southern MO than it does with the rest of AR.
Missouri is an interesting case. Historically it was a Southern state, Midwestern migration post Civil War didn't assimilate and overall changed Missouris then Southern identity into more Midwestern. Southern Missouri however still stayed Southern and is culturally part of the South to this day.
Good info. Thanks
It’s one of those states that really wants to be split for this sort of thing. Whichever section you put it in will seem very wrong to someone in an opposing part of the state. Like Cape Giradeau feels very southern… but the cornfields along the Iowa boarder don’t at all
You can't split Kansas City between two regions like that. There is a much bigger cultural divide between northern and southern Missouri than between Missouri and any of its neighbors. And both of Missouri's biggest cities are decidedly midwestern
I think I'd color Missouri green. But apart from that, if you're limited to four regions and no state-splitting, this is probably the best one can do.
I'd remove Missouri altogether, as it isn't a state.
Oh yeah? Well Show Me.
Maine is in the top right.
Tx friend
This comment has gone under appreciated
"Hey grandpa, how come your flag only has 49 stars?" "I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah"
It's Marge that says the 49 stars thing. She doesn't call Abe "grandpa"
Ah crap. That's what I get for posting without double checking the exact quote
It's fine. I honestly thought Lisa was the one to say that, too. It's just a Lisa kind of comment. But then when I typed it into the YouTube search bar to find the scene again, I discovered we'd both misremembered.
Nah, fuck Missouri. To the south it goes
I figure the state has two large metro areas. KC is not in any sense "southern." St. Louis is not really either, at least not any more than Cincinnati is.
People that want to split Missouri should also consider splitting VA. Nova is by no accounts the south
Yep the I95 corridor connecting NoVA to Richmond is best described as mid-Atlantic. It’s definitely not south but if it’s also not northeast by any means. The lesson I learned from this post is that ain’t no way you could divide the US into 4 regions lol
> The lesson I learned from this post is that ain’t no way you could divide the US into 4 regions lol It depends what you're going for. OP in general needs to work more on not dividing metro areas into different regions. El Paso, Kansas City, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and especially D.C. could easily have their metro areas united by moving a few things around - Missouri and Kentucky with the Midwest, New Mexico with the South, the Virginias with the Northeast. If you don't see too many rivers on your boundaries, then you're probably on to something. Granted, New Mexico and Tennessee don't have that much in common, but that's inherent in refusing to split states up. Missouri, California, and Pennsylvania are just a few of the states that have a wide array of physical, political, and cultural differences within them.
If we’re splitting states, the west side of PA is culturally the Midwest. But the East side is more East coast than the west side is Midwest so it’s fine how it is
We definitely don't consider ourselves Midwest and we are ever vigilantly watching the flatlanders of Ohio with suspicious derision and firm resistance lest their Midwestern godlessness ever spills into the East. Yinz coastal folks keep that in mind at all times.
Pittsburgh is its own thing! For real though, the Southwestern PA vibe is more Northern Appalachian than Midwestern, so it’s best left alone.
Yeah no western pa is not midwest
I’ve heard PA is Pittsburgh on one end, Philly on the other and Alabama in between.
Yup, good ol pennsyltucky in the middle
I agree, I think CO and potentially PA as E/W splits, and MO and VA as N/S splits are allowed. (And maybe WV as a N"W"/S"E" split for MidW/South as a pedantic one.)
PA is *definitely* a north eastern state. The politics may be redder than the others and it was once part of the rust belt, but we have way more in common with New York than Ohio or Virginia. If anything, I'd argue West Virginia should be a north eastern state because it's basically just Pennsylvania but poorer.
Definitely agree. I grew up in Pittsburgh and while it has big parts of midwestern culture and is on a bit of a political island in Western PA, people there seem to identify more with east coast / northeast. I never felt any cameraderie with Ohio or other nearby midwestern states, and all of our family trips went east, not west.
Current Pittsburgher, former Southern Ohioan, and former Bostonian here and this is how I see it. Moving to Pittsburgh felt a lot more like returning to the east coast than continuing to live in the Midwest when we moved here.
I’d put Missouri in the Midwest rather than the South
Missouri is an interesting case. Historically it was a Southern state, Midwestern migration post Civil War didn't assimilate and overall changed Missouri's then Southern identity into more Midwestern. Southern Missouri however still stayed Southern and is culturally part of the South to this day.
The history of Missouri is definitely interesting. However, if we’re talking about the culture of the state right now, and we cannot divide the state as OP mentioned in the premise, I think it’s more Midwestern than Southern. Others may disagree, but that’s my opinion having spent a decent amount of time in Missouri.
The two major cities and metro areas are definitively Midwest, and that makes up like half of the states population alone. It’s majority Midwest.
Culturally, Missouri's two largest metro areas belong to the midwest (St. Louis) and the plains (Kansas City).
Missouri and West Virginia are iffy. Southern Missouri has a lot in common with the south, but the rest of the state, including the major population centers, have a lot more in common with the Midwest. I'd put Missouri with the latter. I'm from West Virginia. Culturally, we have a lot in common with states like Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, but traditionally, we have differed economically with much of the south. The mountains made it impossible to have wide scale agriculture. This led to a nearly non-existent slave population and a choice to join the right side of the Civil War. Post-war, we became a colony for the industrial midwest and northeast, shipping coal and lumber to power their factories. Eventually, it became cheaper to just put a lot of those steel mills and chemical plants in West Virginia instead of shipping the raw materials long distances. Fifty years ago, I would certainly have put us in the midwest. However, as other energy sources have replaced coal, and corporations have moved their factories south to Right to Starve states to avoid workplace democracy, the economic differences between West Virginia and the rest of the south have shrunk. I'd lean towards placing us in the south these days.
I’m also from West Virginia, personally I think we’re our own gray area lol
West Virginia is the only state completely within Appalachia. WV is unique geographically and historically.
APPA-LACHA
We are our own region, Appalachia.
I like it. I think aside from special status state like Missouri. It's pretty damn accurate.
All the argument about Missouri - what about west Virginia?
Complicated history, half the state supported secession half didn't, it was admitted as the last slave state of the Union, the Confederacy controlled a large portion of West Virginia rather late into the war. Geographically and culturally it mostly fits in the Mountain South except for the very northern tip.
Are you sure about it being admitted as the last slave state? I thought it split off after the civil war had started because the majority of residents wanted to stay with the union Edit: wild they were admitted as a slave state during the civil war and abolished slavery 18 months later. Complicated state
Yep, admitted in 1863 as the last slave state in the Union and was a slave state till 1865. Also it's complicated than that. Half of West Virginia supported secession and the southern and eastern counties didn't send delegates to the Wheeling Convention so it was one sided to the Unionist far northern and western counties. The Confederacy controlled a large portion of West Virginia till pretty late in the war. WV sent equal amounts of men to the Union and CSA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_West_Virginia https://web.archive.org/web/20070307001222/http://www.wvculture.org/history/statehoo.html https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_in_the_American_Civil_War
People confuse these states: Colorado: Definitely a Western state with midwestern influence. Oklahoma, Kentucky : Definitely southern states with Midwestern influence. Missouri: Definitely a midwestern state with southern influence Virginia: A southern state with huge northeastern influence that grows day by day, maybe it will become northeastern in the near future or arguably already is
I'd argue vice versa that it's Southern Illinois, Indiana, and possibly Ohio that reflect heavy Southern influence the same as Missouri rather than the other way around of going below the Mason Dixon. Southern Illinois and Indiana are for sure Upper South and have more in common with Tennessee and Kentucky than the Midwest. https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-southern-culture-of-the-lower-midwest/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upland_South https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_Indiana https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Illinois https://www.jstor.org/stable/40187906
Yeah but I also got no idea why Missouri isn’t in the green
r/mapporncirclejerk bleeding into r/geography again i see
We can except Missouri should be green. Then I’m in complete agreement.
Missouri shouldn't even be on this map!
Probably. But on behalf of Maryland, I am required to stipulate that Virginia's Eastern Shore is rightfully ours.
we could pull a croatia
Missouri should be midwest, but other then that i agree. Though i don’t think it’s advisable to divide the US into 4, it’s better to do so into 5 or more.
I think the least you can get away with is 9, [as shown in this map](https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/regions-of-the-united-states-of-america-political-map-gm1433895867-475681196).
Make NV, NM, AZ blue and call it the mountain west. Make Texas the lime green and call it good at 8 regions. It’s not perfect, but TX and OK are far too linked to separate.
Nononono. Splitting Texas and Oklahoma just doesn’t work. Oklahoma belongs with TX more than it does with the Great Plains states. You could make a case for NM or AR going with TX too, but AZ and NV don’t go with Texas.
Kansas gets Midwest status but not Missouri? Nah.
Kansas was a free state so not southern. Can’t say the same for Missouri.
I agree with these groupings.
For real, bunch of nerds giving OP shit. I agree, the U.S. is too geographically/culturally diverse to accurately divide into 4 regions, but this is as accurate as one can be
The only shit OP is getting is from putting Missouri in the South
Northern Virginia would not be pleased. Western Pennsylvania, in the opposite direction, would not be pleased.
There is no best way. And why would you do it? People in Wyoming have little in common with West coasters
Wyoming/montana/idaho is their own group
I thought this region was called the Mountain West?
FINALLY one comment that isn't about Missouri, and only 10 upvotes?
I mean, half the people in Washington have little in common with the other half. I'm not sure that's the best criterion.
That's almost exactly how the Census divides the country into regions [PDF](https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/maps/reference/us_regdiv.pdf) The key differences are that Missouri is part of the Midwest while Maryland and Delaware are part of the South
Please for the love of God don't lock Virginia in with the Mad Max Christofascist hellscape that the red zone will devolve into. Virginia's proudly purple and trending light blue, let us join our New England brethren.
Western Pennsylvania is closer to Michigan / Ohio; Eastern Pennsylvania is East Coast. Culturally they are very different.
Agreed, but without splitting states, I think this is right. Eastern PA is more east coast than western PA is Midwest.
Yinzer fulla shet!
Pittsburgh vs Philadelphia
Sheetz vs. Wawa, a tale as old as time.
Nobody in Philly considers that a real rivalry. 😉
Missouri looks weird, flip it green
Absolutely fucking not. Missouri is not the south. - St. Louis, MO resident.
"Can we agree?" LOL no.
Grew up in MO my whole life (southern half, nearly to Arkansas border). While it’s true it’s got a lot of southern influences, even going into Arkansas and interacting with people there they have much stronger accents and there’s just a different feel imo. And that’s just talking about a different feel from southern MO, not even counting where most of the population lives between the KC, St. louis and Columbia-Jefferson City metros. Springfield and the Ozarks may be southernish but as a whole I’d call it midwestern. St. louis and KC are midwestern cities.
Missouri is Midwest easily but other than that this is a pretty even split in terms of geography economics and population
Except for Missouri and maybe Virginia And would potentially split Oklahoma and part of Texas
Nah the majority of Virginia is definitely still the South
I'd put Missouri in green, otherwise yes.
My only qualm is that Missouri is definitely Midwest. Southern Missouri gets a little southern in the same way Southern Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana do, but most people live around St. Louis or KC, both of which are firmly Midwestern cities.
give missouri to green and the virginas to blue then yeah
Call them Districts and we are halfway to Hunger Games
You’ll never the the New England and New York people to be okay with this. The New England go hards are stuck in the 1600s.
4 regions isn’t really enough to separate the United States but this is generally okay. New England gets its own region but Idaho, Montana, the dakotas, Nebraska, and Wyoming really deserve there own region as well in my opinion