When we left Interstate 80 in Des Moines and headed north to Minnesota, we left the main cultural and commercial arteries of the nation. Each mile north put us farther from that main flow of traffic and more toward the center of that region I am calling the Upper Midwest.

The region can be interpreted in two different ways. It can be thought of in terms of state and physical boundaries as an area comprising North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Or it can be thought of as the region with Minneapolis-St. Paul as the main cultural-commercial capital. The latter region is both narrower and broader than the previous list of states. It adds the easternmost portions of Montana, but it subtracts those portions of Iowa and Wisconsin drawn into Chicago’s more weighty gravitational pull. Milwaukee eliminates still more of Wisconsin under this model, and Omaha more of Iowa and the Dakotas.

I will use both of these concepts of the Upper Midwest. Since I am from the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area and live in its outermost reaches now, I will see the region through the lens of its capital, with all the magnification and distortion that this will provide. I will probably write more about the Twin cities than the surrounding areas, and my focus will probably be rather Minnesota-centric.

The University of Minnesota geographer John R. Borchert called the region “America’s Northern Heartland.” His 1987 book, America’s Northern Heartland: An Economic and Historical Geography of the Upper Midwest, has influenced my view of the region. And wonder of wonders, the book is now online, the University of Minnesota having returned the copyright to the Borchert family. See this map of the region on the book’s Web pages.

According to Prof. Borchert, the region makes up one-tenth of the country’s land. “It is as big as Texas,” he writes, “and twice as empty.”

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 1st, 2004 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Geography, Minnesota.