this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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South of the Mason-Dixon Line includes almost half of your own state of Illinois, and multiple other states that remained loyal to the union.
Did you perhaps mean to refer to the 36°30′ parallel that was used in the Missouri Compromise?
Personally I'm more worried about the 3% of Iowa who doesn't consider itself the Midwest.
Yes the Illinois/Missouri/Iowa group could be nothing other than Midwest, I don’t know how those aren’t 100%. We’re the poster children of Midwest
Missouri is pretty Southern culturally, due to all the racism.
Oh I know, I live here, it’s still IN the Midwest though. STL and KC are at least decent cities, the rest of the state is horrible though
St. Louis is actually referred to (by its tourism board, at least) as "The Gateway to The West". So, if it's not mid west, I don't know what they're thinking.
similarly, there's a good chunk of Southern Illinois that is basically indistinguishable from Kentucky.. same for Indiana..
my guess is that the 4.7% of missourians saying no are all in the ozarks/boot heel
Nah, they can’t read
There's a big cultural divide for Illinois, Chicago isn't very "Midwest" compared to downstate.
To say nothing of Idaho... What bunch of fucking morons. The state is one away from the left coast and they're calling themselves "mid" west? Are they actually that stupid? (Yes, rhetorical.)
As someone from Idaho: yea this pretty much tracks
I mean, if we went with what the word should indicate, Idaho is absolutely the Midwest. As it stands, there's no Mid or Mideast, the real "Midwest" is actually just the middle of the country. At this point, "Midwest* has almost nothing to do with relative location, it's more of a social and economic distinction, which Idaho does fit in with imo.
IIRC, the term was founded when "The West" was pretty much everything west of St. Louis, but it's been decades since primary school, so I could be (and often am) mistaken.
That map for the Mason-Dixon Line is not correct. The original line was at that latitude but it ended at modern day West Virginia. It was the line of demarcation between Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland. It was used in congressional debate during and after the the Missouri Compromise to refer to the line of division between slave states and free states which lead to an unofficial expansion. Since the 1820s it has been understood to move directly north from it's original endpoint until it hits the Ohio River then to follow the river west to the Mississippi River then to travel along the eastern, northern and western borders of Missouri. It ends on the 36°30' parallel and extends straight west through the Louisiana Purchase. The 36°30' line was applicable in the territories but not among the states. The Mason Dixon was the line of separation among the states.
https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/mason-dixon-line.htm
You are indeed correct, my bad it’s early where I’m at lol
Central Illinoisan here, and I’m pretty sure the half of Illinois south of the Mason-Dixon Line is the South, not the Midwest.