The Midwest is the most ambiguous and least welldefined of major American regions. In contrast to the South the West, or New England the Midwest has neither a sharp, clear historical identity nor a strong presence in contemporary popular culture. There are no music or movie genres called “midwesterns” and no traditions of Midwest literature or history comparable to that of the South or West. Even the geographic referent is uncertain. For some, the Midwest refers to the “Old Northwest,” the states north of the Ohio River, between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River. But for others the heart of the Midwest lies in the plains states of Kansas and Nebraska, well to the west of the Mississippi. While an inclusive twelve-state definition centered on the Upper Mississippi-Missouri watershed—Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and the two Dakotas—is becoming somewhat standard, there is no real consensus even on this most basic issue.

Another way of envisioning the Midwest is as the hinterland of Chicago, IL. The Midwest is encompassed by a large semi-circle or arc of economic influence stretching for some 500 miles around the great metropolis of the central US. But the strongest and most common identifying characteristic of the Midwest is agriculture. The Midwest is rural and agrarian, in contrast with the urban and industrial coasts. Because of this identification of farming and region, the encroachment of urbanization and industrialization from the east and the growth of cities like Detroit, MI and Cleveland, OH have gradually shifted perceptions of the region more to the west. Michigan and Ohio have lost some of their credentials as Midwestern states, and are more associated with the industrial northeast. Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska are now the most typical Midwest states.

Farming and pastoralism identify the Midwest with one of the abiding positive themes of American culture, going back to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Thus, the Midwest is often seen as the best and most typical part of America, still resembling a small town and rural “golden age,” before ‘America grew up and moved to the city,” bringing all of the problems that have beset the urbanized nation. Americans think of the Midwest as the safest, most honest, hard-working, friendly middle-class, egalitarian center of American culture. The Midwest is Lawrence Welk, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy and Auntie Em and Toto in The Wizard of Oz, and Main Street in Disneyland (made to resemble Walt Disney’s childhood hometown of Marcelline, Missouri). Above all it is farmers and small towns—to test wide acceptability one asks “How does it play in Peoria?” Hence, commentator George Will opined that if God were an American, he would surely be a Midwesterner.

Nonetheless, the 1920s and 1930s were the apogee of Midwest pride and selfconfidence.

Since the Second World War, the Midwest’s image has been somewhat tarnished. It has seemed to many an increasingly old-fashioned and out of touch backwater in a cosmopolitan, modernizing and multicultural society Isolationism before the Second World War and McCarthyism afterwards hurt the region’s reputation, in spite of Truman and Eisenhower’s political roles as native sons. Subsequent Midwesterners have led majority and minority parties in Congress, but Robert Dole lost to a Southern incumbent in 1996.

A prolonged farming crisis and economic problems in the 1970s and 1980s precipitated a drastic decline in the number of farms and farmers; disasters like floods, tornadoes and droughts recur as themes in news and fictional media. Many Midwest states began to lose population. People fled south and west in droves, leaving behind pejorative labels like rustbelt and snowbelt. A famous albeit controversial proposal envisioned returning much of the Great Plains to its early nineteenth-century state as a “Buffalo Commons.” Some thought a notorious error in which the state of North Dakota was left out of the 1989 Rand McNally atlas was symbolic of the region’s status.

Economic hard times helped foster violent, terrorist individuals and organizations such as the posse commitatus and various “freemen” militias.

But there has also been a more positive side to the picture. Much of this has to do with things rural or “country.” Midwest Living became a commercial success, touting the region’s “clean air, genuine friendships, appreciation for the land, and family oriented values,” in contrast to urban blight and decay. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970– 7), a long-running newsroom sitcom set in Minneapolis, and Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Woebegone, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average,” reinforced more positive images of the region. The farming crisis of the 1980s elicited sympathetic literary and cinematic portrayals of the Midwest. While fictional accounts of the region, from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, Robert Waller’s phenomenally popular Bridges of Madison County, or the Coen brother’s quirky movie Fargo, have not ignored the darker side of the contemporary Midwest, elements of idealism and admiration are also evident in these works.

In short, despite vicissitudes, the Midwest seems likely to remain an important and evolving region, image and concept in contemporary American culture. An influx of Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans is altering the once homogeneously European population. Industrialization and urbanization are on the increase. But the Midwest also retains much of its earlier character. One indication is the increasing tendency of both Midwesterners and outsiders to refer to the region with an openly adulatory and congratulatory label as the nation’s “heartland.” Indeed, it sometimes seems possible that “heartland” may replace the more traditional but problematic “Midwest” as the primary label for this large and vital interior section of the nation. It is hard not to feel optimistic about any region that considers itself and is considered by others to be the “heartland” of a nation.