The heartland, when referring to a cultural region of the United States, is the central land area of the country, [1] usually the Midwestern United States [2] or the states that do not border the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, [3] associated with mainstream or traditional values, such as economic self-sufficiency, conservative political and religious ideals, and rootedness in agrarian life. [2]
The US Census Bureau defines the Midwest as consisting of 12 states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Portions of other non-coastal states can be included in the region as well. These may include eastern portions of the Mountain States (Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming) and northern portions of some Southern states, such as Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
There is no consensus regarding the geographical boundaries of America's heartland. However, the American Midwest is the most commonly cited area as being the nation's heartland, although many other places have been referred to as part of it, often extending to rural or farming regions in the great plains. [4] [5] At least as early as 2010, the term Heartland has been used to refer to many so-called "red states", including those in the Bible belt. [6]
According to the United States Census Bureau, the mean center of population in the US in 2010 was in or around Texas County, Missouri. In 2000 it had been northeast from there, in Phelps County, Missouri. It is projected for the mean center of population to leave the Midwest and enter the Western United States by the mid-21st century. [7]
The geographic center of the 48 contiguous states is near Lebanon, Kansas. When Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union in 1959, the geographic center of the United States moved from Smith County, Kansas to Butte County, South Dakota. The largest city by population in the American heartland is Chicago, Illinois with a metro area nearing ten million people, and it ranks third overall, after New York City and Los Angeles, respectively.
The British geographer Halford Mackinder coined the word in 1904 to refer to the heart of the Eurasian land mass: a strategic center of industry, natural resources and power. [4] The use of the term "heartland" to apply to the American Midwest did not become common until later in the 20th century. [8] [2] [9]
Heartland rock musicians such as Bruce Springsteen (New Jersey), Bob Seger (Michigan), Melissa Etheridge (Kansas), John Mellencamp (Indiana), and Tom Petty have sung about heartland values. Heartland rock albums include Springsteen's Nebraska . The genre is not necessarily Midwestern, as Springsteen was born in New Jersey, and Petty was born in Florida and has sung about the Southern United States, such as in his album Southern Accents . Modern artists of heartland rock include The Killers and The War on Drugs. [10]
The Great Plains, sometimes simply "the Plains", is a broad expanse of flatland in North America. It is located just to the east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. It is the western part of the Interior Plains, which also include the mixed grass prairie, the tallgrass prairie between the Great Lakes and Appalachian Plateau, and the Taiga Plains and Boreal Plains ecozones in Northern Canada. Great Plains or Western Plains is also used to describe the ecoregion of the Great Plains, or alternatively the western portion of the Great Plains.
The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four census regions of the United States Census Bureau. It occupies the northern central part of the United States. It was officially named the North Central Region by the U.S. Census Bureau until 1984. It is between the Northeastern United States and the Western United States, with Canada to the north and the Southern United States to the south.
The Nine Nations of North America is a 1981 book by Joel Garreau, in which the author suggests that North America can be divided into nine nations, which have distinctive economic and cultural features. He also argues that conventional national and state borders are largely artificial and irrelevant, and that his "nations" provide a more accurate way of understanding the true nature of North American society. The work has been called "a classic text on the current regionalization of North America".
The Bible Belt is a region of the Southern United States and one Midwestern state, the state of Missouri, in all of which socially conservative Protestant Christianity plays a strong role in society. Church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. The region contrasts with the religiously diverse Midwest and Great Lakes, and the Mormon corridor in Utah, southern Idaho and northern Arizona.
The Upper Midwest is a region in the northern portion of the U.S. Census Bureau's Midwestern United States. It is largely a sub-region of the Midwest. Although the exact boundaries are not uniformly agreed-upon, the region is usually defined to include the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin; some definitions include Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Nebraska and Montana as well.
A township in some states of the United States is a small geographic area.
The Corn Belt is a region of the Midwestern United States and part of the Southern United States that, since the 1850s, has dominated corn production in the United States. In North America, corn is the common word for maize. More generally, the concept of the Corn Belt connotes the area of the Midwest dominated by farming and agriculture.
The territory of the United States and its overseas possessions has evolved over time, from the colonial era to the present day. It includes formally organized territories, proposed and failed states, unrecognized breakaway states, international and interstate purchases, cessions, and land grants, and historical military departments and administrative districts. The last section lists informal regions from American vernacular geography known by popular nicknames and linked by geographical, cultural, or economic similarities, some of which are still in use today.
Middle America is a colloquial term for the United States heartland, especially the culturally suburban areas of the United States, typically the Lower Midwestern region of the country, which consists of Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and downstate Illinois
The West North Central states form one of the nine geographic subdivisions within the United States that are officially recognized by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Heartland rock is a genre of rock music characterized by a straightforward, often roots musical style, often with a focus on blue-collar workers, and a conviction that rock music has a social or communal purpose beyond just entertainment.
The Central United States is sometimes conceived as between the Eastern and Western as part of a three-region model, roughly coincident with the U.S. Census's definition of the Midwestern United States plus the western and central portions of the U.S. Census's definition of the Southern United States. The Central States are typically considered to consist of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama.
The tornado outbreak sequence of May 2004 was a series of tornado outbreaks that affected much of southern Ontario, the Central and Southern United States from east of the Rockies to the Mid-Atlantic States from May 21 to May 31, 2004. Particularly hard hit were the central Plains from Missouri to Iowa and the Ohio Valley. The Central Plains were hit by two significant outbreaks on May 22 and May 24, the first outbreak of which produced a very large and violent tornado in Hallam, Nebraska. The Ohio Valley was affected by one of the largest tornado outbreaks ever during the Memorial Day weekend on May 29–30.
The Smoky Hills are an upland region of hills in the central Great Plains of North America. They are located in the Midwestern United States, encompassing north-central Kansas and a small portion of south-central Nebraska.
The Upland South and Upper South are two overlapping cultural and geographic subregions in the inland part of the Southern United States. They differ from the Deep South and Atlantic coastal plain by terrain, history, economics, demographics, and settlement patterns.
The Central tall grasslands are a prairie ecoregion of the Midwestern United States, part of the North American Great Plains.
The following works deal with the cultural, political, economic, military, biographical and geologic history of the Midwestern United States.
Wind power in Missouri has an installed capacity of 959 MW from 499 turbines, as of 2016. This provided 1.29% of the state's electricity production.
The Midwestern United States experienced major floods in the spring of 2019, primarily along the Missouri River and its tributaries in Nebraska, Missouri, South Dakota, Iowa, and Kansas. The Mississippi River also saw flooding, although starting later and ending earlier. The 2019 January-to-May period was the wettest on record for the U.S., with multiple severe weather outbreaks through May in the Midwest, High Plains, and South exacerbating the flooding and causing additional damage. Throughout late May and early June, rain in Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri caused every site on the Mississippi River to record a top-five crest. At least three people in Iowa and Nebraska died.