I’m asking this because there seems to be some disagreeing on where certain states are. For example, whether Kentucky is the South, New York is New England, Texas is the South, or Michigan is the Midwest? If you don’t want to spend 10 minutes listing the states of every region, you can just put in your opinion on the debated ones.
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Some regions are more fluidly defined than others. Of your examples, New England is the clearest. It has a very strict and well-understood definition: the six states of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. New York is not part of New England.
Nebraska IMO is split. Eastern part is very much Midwest . Farther west you go you definitely get some of a Wyoming/Colorado “Western” feel
New York is never New England. It’s not a personal preference thing, New England is a well defined region. I’d consider New York + the New England states to be the “Northeast”, but it wouldn’t be hard to argue that PA/NJ could be Northeast too
There is zero dispute about which states are part of New England.
This is just my vauge mental region map
West coast – area west of the cascades and Sierra Nevadas
South West – Areas bordering Mexico
Texas – Texas
The south – most of the states in the former CSA, plus or minus a few
Florida – Florida
Midwest – states bordering the great lakes plus Iowa, Missouri, the Dakotas, Kansas and Nebraska
Western states – Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah ,Nevada and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon
The South: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas. Some would also include Texas in the Southwest region.
Texas is it’s own thing
Midwest or Great Plains is Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, and parts of Missouri.
New England is any original colony that didn’t secede during the Civil War.
The South is anything that did secede during the Civil War.
Rust Belt or Great Lakes region is between the Midwest and New England.
Southwest is areas that were colonized by the Spanish, minus Florida.
Mountain West are the states straddling the Rockies.
Pacific NW is what’s left on the NW.
Here’s how I define the south: if a state seceded, it’s the south
Northeast: NJ, PA, NY, DE, MD, DC
New England (subset of northeast): ME, VT, NH, MA, RI, CT
Fully South: WV, VA, KY, TN, NC, SC, GA, AL, MS, AR, LA
Partially South: FL, TX, OK, MO
Fully Midwestern: OH, IN, MI, IL, WI, MN, IA
Partially Midwestern: MO, KS, OK, NE, ND, SD
Fully Southwestern: AZ, NM, CO, UT, NV
Partially Southwestern: TX, CA
Fully Northwestern: WA, OR, AK, ID
Partially Northwestern: CA, MT?
Hawaii is its own thing. For me the biggest difficulty is where Montana and Wyoming go, as well as Oklahoma. (If you use “west” as a region, though, rather than subdividing it, Montana and Wyoming are a lot easier to classify).
I tend to divide the United States into the former confederacy, the Northeast, the Midwest, the plains, the four-square court, the west coast, the territories, HI, and Alaska.
I think most southerners split “the south” between the south, and The Deep South ™️
As others have said, Texas is its own beast, much like Florida. Our joke is the further south you go in Florida, the more northern it gets.
Mid-atlantic: NY, NJ, PA, MD, DE
Some people really seem to want to put every Central state as Midwestern, which from Indiana, in the Midwest, seems bizarre to me. Honestly I would generally exclude the Dakotas, Nebraska, and definitely fucking Kansas. I dunno, I’d consider them more plains and put them with Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Eastern Colorado.
So, I’d say Midwest = Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Kentucky is too Southern.
There’s no disagreement about what states are New England states, there’s just people who think their hunch on the matter works instead of knowing the definition.
New England is six states: VT, MA, CT, RI, NH, ME. New York is not in New England, “New England” doesn’t mean “The Northeast”, so that one guy who keeps trying to put Pennsylvania in there can siddown.
As to the other ones, they can argue, because it was never official. (I personally find geography enough to define, say, the South, but there are always people who find that offensive. Like, there are folks who will exclude about half the southern states of the country from “The South”, just because.)
Colorado is part Southwestern. Montana is part Northwestern. But Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, parts of Utah and parts of Idaho are Rocky Mtn states that aren’t recognized by most folks but definitely have a bit of their own thing going on.
Food is the easiest way to draw borders. The South ends when you can’t get sweet tea or fresh biscuits all day, the Northeast begins we have people debating on the best bagels and pizza, Midwest begins where corn, butter, and bread reign supreme, the South West begins when you start to see authentic Mexican and Latin American food has a staple as opposed to a novelty, the West Coast begins where you see ridiculous fusions of food as well as a giant amount of vegan, vegetarian, dairy-free, and gluten-free options, the Rocky Mountains Are just kind of everything else that’s left with a heaping helping of good beef.
Well I can’t imagine anyone who has lived in the Midwest for any period of time thinking that Michigan is not Midwestern!
The US Midwest are essentially the states which grew out of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This law served as a blueprint as to how to develop and settle the lands yielded by Great Britain after the peace treaty for the Revolutionary War which were both not yet States and were north of the Ohio River (and thus not in the slave-holding region). The States which eventually were created from the Northwest Ordinance are Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, part of Minnesota and Ohio
Various polls of Americans strongly agree that the first six of these states are part of the Midwest. There is slightly less agreement to include Ohio, but also lots of support that Iowa is in the Midwest even though it was not formed out of the Northwest Ordinance.
Combining the wisdom of the crowd along with the historic legacy of the Northwest Ordinance gives us the right definition of the Midwest. The answer is that the Midwest is comprised of seven states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ohio.
Realizing that state lines don’t always correspond exactly to cultural boundaries, parts of these states will be more emotionally connected to neighboring states than they are to the “Midwest.”
To a lesser degree, polling data shows some people consider the following states to be Midwestern: Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Probably a better description for those states would be Great Plains. Missouri is also probably a better cultural fit with the other Southern “Border States” like Kentucky.
I like this map, myself.
https://www.npr.org/2013/11/11/244527860/forget-the-50-states-u-s-is-really-11-nations-says-author
How could Kin-tuckee not be southern? It is so southern.
I mostly define regions by their culture rather than where they necessarily are. I don’t think states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri should be considered the same area as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
New York is mid-Atlantic, not New England.
It just depends on your metric. Texas is considered Deep South, south, and south western. Florida is in the south, but if you wanna add nuance then south Florida ironically is not part of the south, cause it share almost no cultural characteristics and was essentially built within living memory. Up until the 40’s only mid to north Florida was really populated, and the state only had 2 million inhabitants. Today it has 22 million, most of which immigrated from the north when cheap warm vacation homes became available, from bulldozed swampland and later they’d become permanent residents.
Mid antlantic has overlap with the south, northern and New England have overlap in the sense that all New England states are northern, but not all northern are New England.
Rust belt states can be both northern and midwestern. Midwest can honestly be any states west of the Appalachians including Ohio, as historically they were colonized much later and shared many cultural characteristics. However Ohio can also firmly be called a northern state. Many of the borders of these regions have overlapping states. It’s not jus one or the other, there’s nuance.
Ultimately the if you were to actually draw the borders based on cultural characteristics, they jus wouldn’t adhere to state lines. Some would overlap, some would maybe cut a state in half.
Yes KY is south, NY not NE, TX is geo south but not culturally south, MI is MWest.
It bugs me that Texas is considered part of the southwest, the 4 corners states are what I think of in the SW, not really TX