A few years ago, I wrote a book called How to Speak Midwestern. Before I could begin the research, I had to answer a simple geographic question: where is the Midwest? Based on dialect patterns, I settled on a region bounded by Buffalo and Pittsburgh on the east, and St. Louis on the west, where people speak in Great Lakes, Midland, or North Country accents. Anything beyond that, I figured, was part of the West, or the South.

It turns out that the location of the Midwest is a subjective notion. A recent poll by Middle West Review (published at the University of Nebraska, which is the Midwest) and Emerson College (in Boston — not the Midwest), asked 11,000 residents of 22 states, from Pennsylvania on the east to Idaho on the west, one simple question: “Do you consider yourself to live in the Midwest?”

In 14 states — Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming — a majority answered, “Yah, we live in the Midwest.” (Every one of those states except Oklahoma and Wyoming is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as Midwestern. If the federal government tells you that you live in the Midwest, you learn to agree. Agreeableness is a Midwestern trait, after all.) The most Midwestern state is Iowa — land of corn mazes and butter cows — at 96.7 percent. Close behind is Minnesota — land of Paul Bunyan statues and hotdish casseroles — at 96.5 percent. Here in Illinois — home state of John Deere and Caterpillar, national champion in soybean production — 93.8 percent of us consider ourselves Midwesterners. 

“Well, those are the states that definitely are in the Midwest,” Jon K. Lauck, editor of Middle West Review and the author of the new book The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “Now, not every section of all of those states are in the Midwest. The western parts of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas are sort of the West. The southern tier of counties in Ohio, are Appalachia. The southern half of Missouri is quite southern. So there are some nuances it’s important to take notice of. That’s what the historians and social scientists involved in Midwestern history are sorting out and making more clear.”

(In Ohio, whose junior senator is J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, only 73.8 of residents called themselves Midwesterners.)

Since we’re defining where the Midwest is, we also ought to look at where the term comes from. Before the United States expanded across the Mississippi River, this region was known as the Northwest, after the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the lands acquired from Great Britain after the Revolution into the territories of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. As the nation continued to expand, with the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession, those states no longer constituted the northwestern corner of the United States. They needed a new term to describe themselves. In 1866, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a writer named A. Stevens, whose work is otherwise lost to history, coined the term “Middle West.” That was a good description of a chunk of America that seems unclassifiable to the rest of the country: neither East nor West, but somewhere in between. In 1886, the North American Review, the nation’s oldest literary journal, contracted that to “Midwesterner.” The word “Midwest” itself first appeared in the Overland Monthly in 1894. It did not catch on immediately. Minnesota’s Sinclair Lewis, as Midwestern a writer who ever sat down at a typewriter, continued to use the longer term in his satirical novels of the 1920s. On the first page of Main Street, in his description of his heroine, Carol Kennicott, Lewis declares that “a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.”

 Still, some Midwesterners clung to the region’s old identity as the American frontier. When the universities of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Chicago, Purdue, and Northwestern formed an athletic association in 1895, it was known as the Western Conference. That’s why “The Victors,” the University of Michigan’s fight song, describes the school as “the champions of the West.” The Western Conference later became the Big Nine, then the Big Ten. 

For decades, the Big Ten was confined to states where most people consider themselves Midwesterners. In 1990, though, it began expanding, first to Pennsylvania (9.4 Midwestern), then Nebraska (an impeccably 92.8 percent Midwestern), then Maryland and New Jersey, which weren’t even included in the survey. Now, the conference is discussing adding the West Coast schools of Oregon, Washington, Cal, and Stanford. 

If the Midwest’s athletic conference can expand, why can’t what we traditionally call the Midwest expand, too? As the survey shows, plenty of people in states that are rarely identified as the Midwest consider themselves Midwesterners: 25.2 percent in Idaho, 26.6 percent in Arkansas, even 9.7 percent in Tennessee, the heartland of Southern culture. Lauck’s description of the Midwest to the Argus Leader, in his home state of South Dakota, may explain why: “When you study the Midwest, one of the characteristics that stands out is a sense of egalitarianism rather than privilege or aristocracy. We have long featured an independent spirit that resists external domination. We live closer to our soil, our waters, our forests and grasslands. The Midwest made the Union victory possible, and we still are willingly sending young people into service of country and then welcoming them home with compassion and honor.”

Those sound like values a lot of Americans want to associate themselves with. Maybe the Midwest isn’t just a place. Maybe it’s a state of mind. If you think like a Midwesterner, wherever you live, you can call yourself one, too.