Midwest | History, States, Map, Culture, & Facts (2024)

Midwest, region, northern and central United States, lying midway between the Appalachians and Rocky Mountains and north of the Ohio River and the 37th parallel. The Midwest, as defined by the federal government, comprises the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Actually composed of two regions, the Northwest Territory, or the Old Northwest, and the Great Plains, the Midwest has become more an idea than a region: an area of immense diversity but somehow consciously representative of a national average.

The Northwest Territory entered the United States in 1783 at the conclusion of the American Revolution and was organized under a series of ordinances that set the precedent for the admission of future territories into the Union. The Great Plains entered the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. The Plains were to develop primarily agriculturally, but the Northwest Territory, blessed with both fertile soil and valuable natural resources (coal, oil, iron ore, and limestone), would develop both industrially and agriculturally.

Emerging transportation arteries, first canals and then railroads, linked the Midwest with Eastern markets and firmly established it as part of the industrially expanding North, thus concluding a process begun in 1787 when slavery was outlawed in the Northwest Territory. The region was not without its Southern sympathizers, however, as a number of its settlers, particularly in the Ohio River valley, had migrated from the South, but the Midwest was to give to the brewing sectional crisis not only a new political party (the Republicans, launched in Wisconsin and Michigan) that was devoted to the nonextension of slavery but also two of the Union’s staunchest defenders—Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.

After the American Civil War, the growth experienced by the Midwest was dramatic. Transportation, immigration, and industrialization all played a part. By 1890 Chicago, not even 60 years old, had become the second largest city in the country, and the Midwest accounted for 29 percent of the country’s manufacturing employment and nearly one-third of its value added by manufacture. The Great Plains, however, developed more slowly. Westward migration tended to skip the Plains for the Pacific Coast, and it was not until the late 1800s, when most American Indians had been subjugated, barbed-wire fencing had been introduced, and railroads had penetrated the interior, that the Plains experienced rapid settlement by farmers, ranchers, and tradesmen.

The influence of the Midwest on national life has been significant. In the 1870s it was the main area of activity of the Granger movement and a hotbed of labour agitation. It provided some of the most prominent figures of the Progressive movement (including Robert M. La Follette) and was home for many of America’s most famous industrial giants. It was an innovator in architecture and retailing, a potent force in the settlement-house movement, a centre of temperance activity, and an inspiration to a new school of naturalistic writers such as Hamlin Garland.

Unique in American life, the Midwest has fused the raw and expansive muscle of an urban industrial establishment with the sturdy conservatism of a rural hinterland. But like its neighbours to the northeast, the Midwest’s growth rate has lagged behind that of the country as a whole.

Despite regional economic shifts adverse to the Midwest, the region has continued to be the most important economic region in the country, leading all other sections in value added by manufacture and in total value of farm marketings.