The fact that these are supposed to be cultural categories and it doesn't distinguish Appalachia is enough for me to discount this as total nonsense.
It literally lists Southern and Northern Appalachia...?
But it separates them into the south and northeast.
I have no idea where people who make this garbage get their info.
First, I see nothing "cultural" about these designations, these are regional designations.
I've lived or worked in quite a few of the places listed, and pretty much every one of those is inaccurate.
The "Chesapeake" label - I've never once heard that term used to describe that region, and I have family and friends who grew up there, and I've spent a lot of time there. If someone were to say "Chesapeake" they'd be asked what region of the Chesapeake they're referring to, as it's that large body of water there - the largest estuary in the world, if I remember right, or if they were referring to Chesapeake City, or just the Bay.
What's labeled the Gulf Coast of Florida, most people would call the Panhandle (which is considered part of the Gulf Coast, just has its own designation), with the rest of the Gulf Coast extending down the entire... Gulf Coast of Florida, which measures in the thousands of miles.
These maps keep showing up, and it's like they're done by someone who's never even read about any of the places, or looked at an actual map.
Chesapeake just means "people who know that crabs are meant to be steamed, not boiled."
In my experience this is a surprisingly sharp cultural divide among places where eating crabs is common.
What about the unlabelled grey "dread zone" between the pacific and midwest areas? That's accurate, right?
Oh right, they marked that.
It's real, yeah. Don't go there. Wish I didn't.
The people who made this do not understand American cultural regions. The top level general ones are pretty well known. North East, Mid East, South East, Appalachia, Mid West, Great Plains, Bible Belt, Rockies, South West, SoCal, Valley, North West.
If you want to drill down that's fine but the borders here make no sense at all.
The "interior" region especially makes no sense. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, North Dakota? Pretty much all of those places have wildly different culture from one another.
The differences between Arizona and Nebraska alone are enough to invalidate this.
This is Guam erasure.
Could be worse. Could be-
From an outside perspective, I'm not sure Alaska and the rest of the Pacific have much in common culturally. Same for various areas of the "Interior".
Lumping Philly into the Jersey area is how you start wars.
Personally I think this map is far better at mapping the cultures of the US (source: Monsieur Z "Utahism")
I think this would have worked better without the changing color grades
For the map enthused!
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