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Are you familiar with Buffalo or are you one of these people that thinks all of New York state is skyscrapers and asphalt? Buffalo is 6 hours from NYC. It is significantly different in just about every way.
All the cities along the Great Lakes share a common feeling. Very industrial, brutal winters. Generally crappy economies. Similar immigrants who flooded the cities in the industrial era.
I thought the general consensus with Louisville was that it is both southern and midwestern. We've had about 8 threads on this.
As a NOrtheast Ohio resident who grew up in Maryland, I totally agree that Buffalo is midwestern.
To be precise, Buffalo is actually more than six hours from NYC. It is about 420 miles from NYC, farther away than Youngstown, Ohio. Buffalo is only 180 miles from Cleveland, and about 120 miles from the Ohio border. Buffalo is regionally linked to Cleveland, but just happens to be in the same state as NYC, because New York State has an odd shape.
Buffalo is far more like Cleveland or Toledo than like Philly, Baltimore, NYC, or Boston. I grew up near Baltimore with relatives in South Jersey, so I know what the East feels like. Buffalo is a great lakes city that is rather midwestern, and fits in with Cleveland and Toledo. Folks in Buffalo even talk more like folks from Cleveland and Toledo, without even a hint of even a PA type accent. A Western New Yorker will not have an accent in Cleveland like someone from Jersey or Eastern PA will.
Is Buffalo midwestern as compared to a city like Minneapolis or Omaha? Definitely not. Buffalo is midwestern in a Cleveland kind of way. More friendly and laid back than the East Coast, but energetic and still very much geared to industry and transportation. It is certainly not in the farm belt, but it is surrounded by lots of farmland and beautiful countryside, and is several hundred miles from the east coast cities, just like Cleveland.
Very interesting thread - by the way, Ohio & Cleveland are VERY much in the midwest. I think someone thought they should be northeast.
Actually Pittsburgh is the interesting city. Everyone in the northeast generally associates only cities somewhat near the Atlantic Ocean as northeastern. But Pittsburgh has the Pennsylvania all the way to Philadelphia, yet hardly gets recognized by northeasterners as northeastern.
Yet at the same time, they certainly aren't midwestern. Anyways, Ohio is east of the Appalachians, and definetely midwestern. Pittsburgh is probably as west as you can get to still be northeastern, and even that city is highly debateable if it is.
I kinda consider Missouri to be more like the south. But that is just me...
if you base your perceptions on the map, then you obviously consider maryland a southern state as well. missouri never seceded from the union during the civil war, but rather it was one of the few non-confederate states that permitted slavery under the missouri compromise, along with maryland, kentucky, delaware, and west virginia. if you look at a map of the union territory, missouri will appear there, too.
The Midwest is a funny term anyway. The states VARY drastically and not everyone agrees what is or isn't Midwest. I've seen maps that include Iowa/Nebraska/Kansas and maps that exclude them. Better term may be Great Lakes States and the Plains states. Really...what is the commonality of Minnesota with say Indiana or Ohio? Well now I'm off my Soap box... Like someone said, it's were the Scandinavians settled versus the Germans. Upper Midwest would be Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan. Lower would be Indiana, Illinois, Ohio. I personally still argue that Missouri is Soutern.
if you base your perceptions on the map, then you obviously consider maryland a southern state as well. missouri never seceded from the union during the civil war, but rather it was one of the few non-confederate states that permitted slavery under the missouri compromise, along with maryland, kentucky, delaware, and west virginia. if you look at a map of the union territory, missouri will appear there, too.
This is a fairly contemporary map of the southeast, a combination of the 2000 Census Ancestry map, which is the base map, the red line is the Telsur map of Southern Dialect South Regional Map.
The dark green line is the states and areas that voted formally to secede from the United States in 1860-61. This includes the counties of West Virginia that voted to secede, which are usually left off maps of Secession. Within the purple line are the states with a majority of Evangelical Christian as the major religion according to the Pew Religion Survey. U.S. Religion Map and Religious Populations - U.S. Religious Landscape Study - Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
That ancestry map is interesting. Ive been to the Upper Penninsula and that Finnish presence is pretty clear. In some cases the buildings have Finnish writing on them and the country roads have Finnish names since they where named for Finnish farmers (where there was some farming...its mostly mining country up there). They even used to have Finnish language radio. I guess that is one thing that makes the Upper Midwest different...that big Scandanavian influence. Even Iceland..there was an island in Lake Michigan that was settled by Icelanders.
For the cities it was a big in-migration from Central and Southern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Italy) that agumented the Germans and Irish who came earlier, making the place very Catholic. Or in some places Orthodox (if there are a lot of Serbs & Greeks, for example).
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