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Website

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State information resources for all things about the 50 states including alphabetical states list, state abbreviations, symbols, flags, maps, state capitals, songs, birds, flowers, trees and much more

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The States

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The States Video

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The States Worksheet

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States Song

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Northeast Video

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Northeast Song

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The Northeastern US Geography Song & Video: Rocking the World

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Northeast Wesbite

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Northeast Worksheet

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Northeast Book

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Southeast: Book

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Southeast: Song

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Southeast Region - States and Capitals Song

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Southeast: Video

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West Book

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West Worksheet

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Video

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West Website

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U.S. STATE FACTS

Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs

Introduction - U.S. Western Region
The western region of the United States is a huge area where a wide range of landforms, climates, and people can be found. What you will find in the U.S. States that comprise this vast region are some of the most beautiful beaches in the US, temperate rainforests stretching from California up along the coast to Washington, huge mountains like Pikes Peak in Colorado, and natural wonders like the stone arches in Utah's Arches National Park. Below you will find a list of interesting facts about the western region of the US. There are also links to the states that make up this region all with a list of facts about that state. Whether you are kid working on a school project or an adult interested in learning more about the West read on for more interesting facts.

Click here for a great selection ofAmazon.com books about the western United States.

On this site we will not count Alaska and Hawaii as part of the U.S. West Region but will rather include them in the non-Contiguous states section.
List of States in the U.S. Western Region

California

Oregon

Washington

Colorado

Idaho

Montana

Nevada

Utah

Wyoming

Interesting Facts about the States in the West Region

The western region of the United States is often further broken down into the West Coast Region consisting of the three states that border the Pacific Ocean; California, Oregon, and Washington and the Mountain States, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.

Parts of what was to become the western states of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado were acquired in 1818 from France in the Louisiana Purchase.

This region has both the least populous state in the United States, which is Wyoming, and the most populous U.S. State, California.

The West Region has numerous large cities. In fact the second largest city in the U.S., which is Los Angeles, is located there. Other large cities include San Diego (California), San Francisco (California), Las Vegas (Nevada), Denver (Colorado), and Portland (Oregon).

The city of Hollywood California is the center of the film industry in the United States.

Numerous Indian tribes have inhabited the western region of the U.S.; living there hundreds of years before white settlers arrived. In fact California has more Indian tribes than any other U.S. state.

The Oregon Trail, which passed through several current day western states, was traveled by settlers from the east to the western territories. At first it was only passable by walking or on horseback but in the 1840s it was cleared enough for wagons to travel and enabled hundreds of thousands of settlers to reach the West; especially during the California Gold Rush of 1849.

The Transcontinental Railroad connecting the railroad lines in the east to the west coast of the United States was completed in 1869. What once took months, to travel from the east to the west, was reduced to less than a week. The impact on the development of the West was huge.

U.S. Highway Route 66, which stretches from Chicago, Illinois to California was opened in 1926 and resulted in increased tourism and business for the western states. Later in the 20th century several interstate highways were built resulting in even more tourism and business.

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WESTERN U.S. - over 20 interesting key facts

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U.S. STATE FACTS The western region of the United States is a huge area where a wide range of landforms, climates, and people can be found. What you will find in the U.S.

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West Song

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Southeast: Worksheet

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Southeast: Website

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the South, region, southeastern United States, generally though not exclusively considered to be south of the Mason and Dixon Line, the Ohio River, and the 36°30′ parallel. As defined by the U.S. federal government, it includes Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. The South was historically set apart from other sections of the country by a complex of factors: a long growing season, its staple crop patterns, the plantation system, and Black agricultural labour, whether slave or free. White domination of Blacks characterized Southern politics and economics from the 17th century and began to yield only after World War II.

The warm climate of the South affords a period of 200-290 frost-free days per year, enabling such profitable crops as tobacco, rice, sugarcane, and cotton to be grown. This climate, coupled with abundant rainfall, offered 17th- and 18th-century European settlers a superb opportunity to raise crops for export if an adequate permanent labour supply could be found. The source proved to be enslaved Africans, made available for purchase through the international slave trade. From this unique situation of supply and demand arose the system of plantation slavery, which above all other factors distinguished the South from other U.S. regions. By 1790, Black people constituted about one-third of the Southern population and almost the entire workforce on the plantations. At the beginning of the American Civil War (1861), more than four million Black people remained in bondage, though less than one-sixth of the white population actually owned slaves.

Economically, the antebellum and cotton-oriented South looked to the British textile industry for its market and opposed the growing politico-economic power of the industrializing North. The Southern social philosophy, holding to an ideal of rural gentry, presented a sharp contrast to that of the North: it stressed a genteel, aristocratic lifestyle rather than one based on the earnest accumulation of money.

In the period between the American Revolution (1775-83) and about 1830, the North, spurred by the abolitionists, passed from mild opposition to strong condemnation of slavery. In response, the white South rose to an unqualified defense of its "peculiar institution," supporting it on the grounds of biblical sanction, economic justification, the supposed racial inferiority of Black people, and the necessity for a well-ordered society. Southern separatism in defense of slavery culminated in 1860-61, when 11 Southern states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee) seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. The ensuing Civil War (1861-65) wrought immense destruction on much of the South, which emerged the loser in the conflict. In many areas, cropland was ruined, livestock lost, railroads destroyed, and billions of dollars in slave-related investments wiped out. Recovering slowly from this destruction, much of the South continued to rely largely on a one-crop economy-cotton, tobacco, or rice-and to cultivate the crops with the labour of African American freedmen. After Reconstruction ended (1877), the white-dominated South's continuing insistence on the inferiority and subordination of African Americans through a system of legalized racial control measures known as Jim Crow laws resulted in the replacement of slavery with three institutions: the economic system of sharecropping (tenant farming), the political system of one-party politics ( Democratic), and the social system of racial segregation, supported by law and custom.

Until 1932 the South remained an impoverished and undiversified region. The growth of a textile industry in the Carolinas and the movement to develop a "New South" after the Civil War had not seriously qualified the region's commitment to cotton, to agriculture, and to a rural way of life. African Americans remained a kind of peasantry, and the income of the South stood at only $372 per capita in 1929, while income outside the South was $797 per capita. Chronic overproduction of cotton, with its attendant low prices, forced more and more farmers, both Black and white, into sharecropping; between 1880 and 1930 Southern land tenancy increased from 36 to 55 percent. The Great Depression of the 1930s caused a total bankruptcy of the cotton economy, which was not relieved until federal New Deal legislation intervened to provide payments for reducing cotton acreage and for unemployment relief. Both of these devices encouraged migration to the cities, a trend that was accelerated during World War II by a heavy influx of Southern African Americans in Northern industrial centres ( see Great Migration).

The New Deal, however, was ultimately to benefit the South. The cotton acreage quota system led to improvements in productivity and to diversification of the agricultural base. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a vast river-development scheme created in 1933, brought electricity to many rural families, further increased farmland productivity through flood control and improved soil management, and laid the groundwork for new industry.

Norris Dam Courtesy of the Tennessee Valley Authority

After World War II the South began to experience sustained growth and industrialization, particularly in the lumber, paper, petrochemical, and aerospace industries. The cultivation of citrus and other fruits, peanuts (groundnuts), and soybeans eradicated the Deep South's historic dependence on cotton, which fell below livestock, poultry, and textiles in production value. By the 21st century, manufacturing was the largest sector of the economy in most Southern states.

During the second half of the 20th century, the population of the South boomed, exceeding 100 million by the end of the century, when the increasingly urban region contained two-fifths of the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas. By the 2000 census, Texas had surpassed New York as the second most populous state. Moreover, Florida's population more than doubled in the final three decades of the 20th century. As the demographic balance of the country shifted southward, the South consistently gained Congressional representation. Meanwhile, the region's political profile changed dramatically. A split in the Democratic Party in response to its postwar civil rights platform led to the ascendency of George Wallace and caused many segregationist Southern conservatives to flee to the Republican Party. This split was so exacerbated by the growing civil rights movement of the 1960s that by the 1980s the Democratic monopoly of the South was fully broken. Ever wealthier, the South played an increasing role in national politics beginning in the final quarter of the 20th century. Democrats Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas as well as Republicans George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush of Texas were elected president, and Southern support became pivotal to successful presidential campaigns. The controversial continued use of the Confederate flag by some Southern states remains a hotly debated political issue, as are Confederate monuments.

Selma March Peter Pettus/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-08102)

Culturally, the South boasts a literary tradition stretching from Sidney Lanier and Kate Chopin in the 19th century to William Faulkner, James Agee, and Eudora Welty in the 20th century and to Jesmyn Ward, Ron Rash, Natasha Trethewey, Wendell Berry, and Tayari Jones in the 21st century. It has also been the crucible of jazz, blues, rock, and country music.

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the South | Definition, States, & History

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the South, region, southeastern United States, generally though not exclusively considered to be south of the Mason and Dixon Line, the Ohio River, and the 36°30′ parallel. As defined by the U.S. federal government, it includes Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

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Midwest Website

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U.S. STATE FACTS

The Gateway Arch in Saint Louis

Introduction - U.S. Midwest Region
Often referred to as American's Heartland, anyone that has ever really explored the Midwest region of the United States will tell you, there is much more to it than just agriculture and expansive farmland. Yes, you will find farms, but what you will also find is the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world, the Great Lakes. You will also find one of the most famous landmarks in America. George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln will forever live on in the Black Hills of South Dakota where their faces were carved into Mount Rushmore. Perhaps you are familiar with the Mall of America, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the name Tornado Alley, all of which are associated with the Midwest. On this page we have listed relevant facts about the Midwest region of the US including which states make up the Midwest. You will also find links to pages with descriptions of each Midwest state. Whether you are a kid who is doing a research project or an adult who is looking for specific information, we hope you find the information both interesting and useful.

Click here for a great selection ofAmazon.com books about the Midwest.

Basic Midwest Region US State Facts

The 12 states that make up the mid-western region of the United States include Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

Because there are no oceans in the Midwestern United States, temperatures can often be extreme with fluctuations in temperature throughout the year sometimes exceeding 100 degrees or more. Summers can be brutally hot, while winters can be downright bone chilling.

Although Tornado Alley does not have any clearly defined borders, the most severe and frequent tornadoes usually occur in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and the Midwest states of Missouri and Iowa.

Midwest Region Points of Interest

Using mostly dynamite and the manpower of approximately 400 people Mount Rushmore, located near Keystone South Dakota, was completed in 1941 and became one of the Midwest most amazing points of interest.

Bloomington, Minnesota is home to the Mall of America, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the United States. With over 400 events each year and over 400 stores as well as a waterpark, aquarium, mini-golf course and much, much more, it's easy to see why over 35 million people visit the mall each year.

Saint Louis, Missouri is where you will find the world's tallest arch; the Gateway Arch. It towers 630 feet (192 meters) tall, is made of stainless steel and was completed in 1965.

Interesting Midwest Region US State Facts

Chicago, Illinois is the most populated city in the Midwest US states and the third largest city in the nation.

Some of the major cities in the Midwest include Detroit, St. Paul, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and St. Louis.

The deadliest tornado in U.S. history ripped through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana killing 695 people in March of 1925.

The Ohio River, Upper Mississippi River and Missouri River are the major rivers that flow through the Midwest.

The Midwestern states are nestled between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian Mountains, right in the middle of the U.S.

Major crops in the Midwest are wheat, corn and oats; giving rise to the nickname the "Breadbasket of America".

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U.S. STATE FACTS Often referred to as American's Heartland, anyone that has ever really explored the Midwest region of the United States will tell you, there is much more to it than just agriculture and expansive farmland. Yes, you will find farms, but what you will also find is the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world, the Great Lakes.

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Midwest Book

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Midwest Video

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Midwest Capitals and States Song

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Midwest Worksheet