this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Mildly Interesting
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Pretty sure they're implying that the region west of the 13 colonies was called the Midwest, not that Ohio was considered the Midwest because it was one of the original colonies...
That leaves the majority of the country as the Midwest then and that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Really trying to make states fit into 3/4 designations doesn’t work, we need to split them into like 8 to make sense
So originally anything west of the Appalachian mountains was called the west. Then as they explored more of the land and gained territories the line that defined the west moved to the Mississippi, making the territories between the Appalchians and Mississippi the Midwest.
Now the regions are split based on census data, and there are huge swaths of land in the West and Midwest that are sparsely populated so they are larger regions in size.
It makes sense if you actually look into it and take a 5 minute google search to learn about it.
Sure, but designations from 200 years ago are irrelevant to a modern nation spanning a continent with colonies and military bases spanning the globe. To call everything west of the Appalachian mountains “the west” is nonsense now