AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The tops of the tickets come from the coast. The VP choices, though - proudly Midwestern.
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JD VANCE: I grew up in Middletown, Ohio...
(APPLAUSE)
VANCE: ...A small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts.
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TIM WALZ: Minnesota's strength comes from our values, our commitment to working together, to seeing past our differences, to always being willing to lend a helping hand. Those are the same values I learned on the family farm and tried to instill in my students.
RASCOE: That was JD Vance talking up his roots in the Buckeye State and Tim Walz's Minnesota nice. But is Vance really and famously from Appalachia? Is Walz, who was born in Nebraska, actually from the Plains? What is the Midwest anyway? Jon Lauck is the editor of the scholarly publication Middle West Review and the author most recently of "The Good Country: A History Of The American Midwest 1800-1900," and he joins us now. Welcome to the program. Did you bring a hot dish?
JON LAUCK: (Laughter) No, Ayesha, but I am sitting next to a Midwestern lake, and I can hear the geese honking in the background, so that's pretty close.
RASCOE: Oh, wow. Yeah, the lake sounds amazing. The geese, I don't know. Let's start with the basics. Where, in your opinion, according to your research, is the Midwest? What are the borders?
LAUCK: Well, the Midwest is a region of 12 states, so it stretches from Ohio out to Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.
RASCOE: So North Dakota, South Dakota - those are all Midwest to you.
LAUCK: The Dakotas are definitely Midwestern, but there is...
RASCOE: OK.
LAUCK: ...A tendency to divide the states in two. In the case of South Dakota, just to take an example, East River or the part - the half of the state that's east of the Missouri River is very heavily Midwestern. It's small town. It's farm-oriented. It's like Iowa. But West River, you start to become more classically Western.
RASCOE: But what about places like southern Ohio, which is heavily influenced by the Appalachians, or southern Missouri, which is more like the Deep South, because it sounds like some of this depends on who you ask?
LAUCK: Well, in the case of Ohio, ever since the coal mines in eastern Kentucky began to be mechanized and put a lot of people out of work, a lot of Appalachians started to move into the industrial Midwest. So they would move to places like Akron, Ohio, which people used to call the capital of West Virginia because there were so many people from Appalachia living there. And that is the backstory of JD Vance. His family comes up on the Hillbilly Highway, as they called it, into the industrial Midwest. And this shows up in our polling. We did a large-scale poll of Ohio a few months ago, and most of Ohio identifies as heavily Midwestern. But that southeastern tier of counties, the numbers were much higher there for people who identified as Appalachian.
RASCOE: Is the part of rural Nebraska that Walz is from - is it more like the Plains?
LAUCK: The part of Nebraska that Walz is from is a place that I've called an interior borderland. If you go to Valentine, Neb., where he grew up most of his life, it feels very Western, and it's right next to the Rosebud Indian Reservation. And it's hard to grow traditional corn in that part of Nebraska because the rainfall levels are so low compared to what they would be back in central Iowa.
RASCOE: Is there something when we talk about the Midwest? As you say, it's obviously a geographic region. But is there part of this idea of the Midwest being the quintessential American idea, which - that can have a lot of undertones to it, racial, and otherwise, but is there a sense of the Midwest as quintessentially American?
LAUCK: Historically, the Midwest throughout the 19th century - economically, it became the boom region. Population-wise, it was our biggest region. Urbanization-wise, Chicago became the pace setter. It was passing civil rights laws a hundred years before the national civil rights laws were passed through Congress. The armies supplied by the Midwest won the Civil War. The Midwest was seen as the most American part of America, the place where the most progress had been made, the place where the highest education levels had been attained. So the Midwest has had some hard times in the last 30 or 40 years because of deindustrialization and the problems in the farm sector. But as a historical matter, there's a lot of evidence to justify the view of the Midwest as the good region.
RASCOE: Let's end on food. I'm thinking tater tot casserole, Cincinnati chili, pierogis, runzas. What does your quintessential Midwest menu look like?
LAUCK: Well, all of those would definitely fit on it. And walleye - this is fishing country in here. And, of course, there are classic dishes like cinnamon rolls and chili, which I think we are having tonight.
RASCOE: That's historian Jon Lauck. Thanks so much for speaking with us.
LAUCK: Thanks, Ayesha.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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