The orignally planned topic, Indians Native Americans had to be put on hold.
Don't worry, he'll get over it.
Anyhoo, our topic this week is geographic, economic, cultural and poltical regions of the US. Get ready for maps, lots of maps.
First the topology of the US
With some descriptive names added.
Then there's the division into states
The most basic division of the country would be into three very big regions, The North, The South and the West. The traditional psychological dividing line between East and West has been the mighty Mississippi River
East of the river, the dividing line between the North and South was something called the Mason-Dixon line, originally established to solve border disputes between several states.
But now, when people think of it they move it south and extend it further west. In popular imagination it would usually look like this.
There are several similar popular ways of dividing the country into regions (which usually use state borders as regional borders). Here's a simple one.
And here's another (slightly more complex).
Similar divisions are made both by the US government (like this one for the Center for Disease Control)
And private companies, like this one.
For about 30 years, an influential social science model divides all of North America into nine "nations" which mostly don't coincide with state, province or national borders. This map looks like this.
Or this.
There is also an interesting recent attempt to drap a political history and values map of US regions, it looks like this:
The whole article is
here.
