Cultural Regions of the United States
Cultural Regions of the United States
I have no idea where people who make this garbage get their info.
First, I see nothing "cultural" about these designations, these are regional designations.
I've lived or worked in quite a few of the places listed, and pretty much every one of those is inaccurate.
The "Chesapeake" label - I've never once heard that term used to describe that region, and I have family and friends who grew up there, and I've spent a lot of time there. If someone were to say "Chesapeake" they'd be asked what region of the Chesapeake they're referring to, as it's that large body of water there - the largest estuary in the world, if I remember right, or if they were referring to Chesapeake City, or just the Bay.
What's labeled the Gulf Coast of Florida, most people would call the Panhandle (which is considered part of the Gulf Coast, just has its own designation), with the rest of the Gulf Coast extending down the entire... Gulf Coast of Florida, which measures in the thousands of miles.
These maps keep showing up, and it's like they're done by someone who's never even read about any of the places, or looked at an actual map.
26What about the unlabelled grey "dread zone" between the pacific and midwest areas? That's accurate, right?
4Oh right, they marked that.
It's real, yeah. Don't go there. Wish I didn't.
4
Chesapeake just means "people who know that crabs are meant to be steamed, not boiled."
In my experience this is a surprisingly sharp cultural divide among places where eating crabs is common.
2
The people who made this do not understand American cultural regions. The top level general ones are pretty well known. North East, Mid East, South East, Appalachia, Mid West, Great Plains, Bible Belt, Rockies, South West, SoCal, Valley, North West.
If you want to drill down that's fine but the borders here make no sense at all.
23The "interior" region especially makes no sense. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, North Dakota? Pretty much all of those places have wildly different culture from one another.
5The differences between Arizona and Nebraska alone are enough to invalidate this.
3
This is Guam erasure.
15Could be worse. Could be-
8
From an outside perspective, I'm not sure Alaska and the rest of the Pacific have much in common culturally. Same for various areas of the "Interior".
14Alaska... is weird. It consists of a few city's and an enormous amount of very sparely populated land, it has no income tax on individuals and literally pays its residents.
2
Lumping Philly into the Jersey area is how you start wars.
11The fact that these are supposed to be cultural categories and it doesn't distinguish Appalachia is enough for me to discount this as total nonsense.
9It literally lists Southern and Northern Appalachia...?
3But it separates them into the south and northeast.
2
Personally I think this map is far better at mapping the cultures of the US (source: Monsieur Z "Utahism")
8Locally 0.3 is referred to as The NYC TriState Area
4TriState area
I only ever hear this phrase in an American context. Are your states more likely to meet with 3 at a point or something? I never hear "quadstate" or "bistate" area?
1Theu don't actually meet at a point, but suburbs in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut all feed into and support New York City. We do have a couple of "bi-state" areas like St. Louis, Kansas City, and Cincinnati. It's the result of our cities rising into prominence after political boundaries were drawn up, whereas most major European cities had the modern political boundaries drawn up around them.
The only cotoes that i would really describe as "tri-state" are NYC, Washington (since the District of Columbia is a seperate entity than Maryland and Virginia) Philadelphia, and Chicago. Philadelphia is the only one of these where the 3 states actually meet at a single point though.
6It's a mathematical property of regions of a 2D space that 3 will naturally meet at a point, but 4 or higher have to be contrived to meet at a point. In the US we do have the 4 corners, which is where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, so there is precedent.
5There’s the quad cities
2
I think this would have worked better without the changing color grades
3As someone who has spent many years in both South-Central and West-Central Indiana... What? We're the South in all but name.
2You may be rural and conservative but Indiana is in no way "Southern".
6As as Southerner, this
3Have you been to this part of Indiana? Because you walk into an Indiana diner and you'll see a lot of familiar stuff on the menu that belongs in the South. You'll also hear accents that sound like they belong in the South.
It's really silly to think that Southern culture just stops at the Kentucky border line.
Also, I'm talking about the southern half of Indiana. Not all of Indiana.
1
Being a rural hick doesn't make you southern. It's only been the last 20-30 years that Midwest small towns have been trying to preteend that they are southern rednecks.
3I'm 47. No it hasn't.
Not only am I 47, I'm 47 and married to someone who's family goes back to Indiana from the mid-1800s, mostly the Owen County area.
It's the South. It is. You go to Kentucky or Tennessee, it's basically the same culture except they get to call themselves Southern. Even most of the traditional food is much more southern. Grits, okra, cornbread, you name it.
0
East Texas has more in common with the non-reservation areas of Oklahoma than Central Texas does.
1Most of these are pretty shoddy, but this one is really good. It's detailed and accurate about a lot of the idoiosyncrasies.
Like FlyingSquid I would have pushed "The South" a little further north into Western Pennsylvania, and up through Missouri into south Indiana. And what in the world is "The Northwoods," that's the YooPee and Wisconsin is upper midwest. But other than that it's spot on as to a whole lot of the details. South Florida as part of the Caribbean, Washington/Oregon as part of the interior once you get away from the coast... it has a lot of little important details right.
-3Absolutely not. Culture has far more to it than politics.
3I can always tell with food. In the Midwest you don't dare use any spice except salt and maybe some rosemary on Christmas. Anything else is too fancy. The West Coast has their own style, northeast has chowder and seafood, except salmon which is the PNW. Interesting how they all separate.
I remember driving through the Midwest and I just wanted a sparkling water. Anything bubbly. They had coolers and coolers of soda and added sugar drinks, two small things of actual water, and one thing of liquid death, with added sugar. Wild place
2
I grew up on the cusp of south and Caribbean, and I can't honestly claim the rest of the south or the rest of the Caribbean. I always say I'm a Southerner, but a lot of what makes that culture isn't something I have experienced. Florida is weird because it's so full of people that have only lived there for a generation or less, alongside people who have lived there for over a century.
Most of the other places I've lived are melting pots, but I can still see the over arching cultures there that are labeled in this map.
3northwoods is a regional forest, like a boreal forests but not quite one. it runs from the boundry waters in Minnesota down to duluth. through this weird gross area on the southern edge of lake superior. before finally getting into an area smart enough to say it's michigan even though its not touching michigan, thus no longer being gross. and the people living in that forest are definitely their own kinda people.
3