Maryland a southern state (Baltimore, Cumberland: basement, counselor, territory)

[Hamish Forbes]

All this is sort of like:

"The reason why academic politics are so bitter is because so little is at stake."

-- often attributed (arguably incorrectly) to Henry Kissinger

[BajanYankee]

Originally Posted by westsideboy

The wiki-wars weren't over just Maryland. It was pretty much every border state and their split identities. I never contributed to the PA page, but my guess if you look back at the archived discussion pages, there would have been a dispute at some time.

I never saw anyone disputing whether Pennsylvania was a Northeastern state. I mean, if Maryland is a border state, then it begs the question of what exactly it is bordering. For Maryland to be a "border" state, logic dictates that it borders a Northeastern state.

Originally Posted by westsideboy

I do think the northern MD east of Sideling Hill is "Greater PA." They eat all sorts of PA Dutchy things I had never heard of, the small agricultural cross road towns have identical architecture to the similar sized places in PA. They vote the same way, etc.

I guess. That just sounds odd to me. It would be like calling Northern Virginia "Greater Maryland."

Originally Posted by westsideboy

The stumbling block with putting PA in with states to its north is dialect, settlement patterns, history, and culture. Placing them together is not a natural grouping of shared cultural traits.

What cultural traits? As a current New Yorker who grew up in Philadelphia and went to college in Boston, I can tell you that there are no "cultural" traits shared among these cities...at least none that go beyond mere historical artifact.

Pennsylvania has its own unique history. We are not the same as New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island. We were settled by Quakers, or the "Friends" as we learned in Philly public school ("Quaker" was considered a perjorative term during its time, but has more positive connotations today) and then later Germans. But none of this really has any bearing on whether the state is Northeastern, Southern or Midwestern. As a whole, I have always said that Pennsylvania is more characteristically similar to Ohio than it is to New York, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a Northeastern state.

The same could be said for Cleveland even...only in reverse. The Yankee Migration moved through Northeastern Ohio but not Southeastern Pennsylvania, yet Cleveland is considered the Midwest through and through and Philadelphia is considered the Northeast through and through. None of that changes because Cleveland has the Northern Cities shift while Philadelphia doesn't (though that appears to have changed in recent times).

[BajanYankee]

Originally Posted by westsideboy

Still, natural groupings do exist, and I think I explained pretty well why Philly clades with Baltimore more than cities to its north. This would not be if Philly, NYC, and Boston formed a natural group aside from the more generalize "urban east coast" culture.

Personally, I feel that Baltimore has always had a different feel from New York and Philadelphia. Theodore Sheckels in his book Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005 sums it up this way:

Baltimore City itself is, of course, at the center of metropolitan Baltimore. Although one might quickly connect it to the other major cities to its northeast (Philadelphia, New York City), Baltimore has always had a much more "southern" feel to it.

https://books.google.com/books?id=rp...20feel&f=false

And that's the basic difference between Baltimore and Philadelphia. The former has a Southern heritage that's still manifest in subtle and not so subtle ways in the present day whereas the latter does not. So the two cities don't feel that similar to me even if they are physically and spacially similar.

[BajanYankee]

If you're interested in Philadelphia history (and Pennsylvania history), there's a great web series called Philadelphia: The Great Experiment.

https://www.youtube.com/user/GreatEx...tFilm/featured

You will never hear a Pennsylvanian call any part of the Commonwealth "Greater MD" or anything like that. It's the same way you will never hear Princeton refer to itself as the "Pepperdine of the East." There's so much Philadelphia and Pennsylvania have contributed, and so many notable icons that hail from there, that there's no need to latch on to another state's identity.

Betsy Ross
Amish Country
U.S. Steel
Hershey Chocolate
Declaration of Independence
Benjamin Franklin
Society of Friends
Bank of the United States (First and Second)
Continental Congress
The Main Line
Louis Kahn
Noam Chomsky
Joe Montana
American Bandstand
Princess Grace
Abolitionism
Soft Pretzels

Pennsylvanians have much to be proud of! In school, they basically teach us that we were the ones who built America...with our steel and with our ideals!

[Ball freak]

Originally Posted by BajanYankee

Personally, I feel that Baltimore has always had a different feel from New York and Philadelphia. Theodore Sheckels in his book Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005 sums it up this way:


https://books.google.com/books?id=rp...20feel&f=false

And that's the basic difference between Baltimore and Philadelphia. The former has a Southern heritage that's still manifest in subtle and not so subtle ways in the present day whereas the latter does not. So the two cities don't feel that similar to me even if they are physically and spacially similar.

Maybe it has a more southern feel but Baltimore and Washington have a lot more in common with Philadelphia than Richmond culturally, linguistically and politically with Philadelphia than Richmond from a modern standpoint.

[BajanYankee]

Originally Posted by Ball freak

Maybe it has a more southern feel but Baltimore and Washington have a lot more in common with Philadelphia than Richmond culturally, linguistically and politically with Philadelphia than Richmond from a modern standpoint.

Yes, we've heard your "culturally, linguistically, politically" line 877 times already. Seriously, some of you guys are Northeastern groupies.

I would suggest that you focus on the things you like about your state, if you even live there, instead of trying to piggyback on the identity of other states and cities.

[DCK29]

No we are not Northeast groupies Banjo Yankee we are part of the region not the south get over it. These people and their egos.

[BajanYankee]

Originally Posted by DCK29

No we are not Northeast groupies Banjo Yankee we are part of the region not the south get over it.

You are groupies. Or schlong-riders, if you prefer.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by BajanYankee

I never saw anyone disputing whether Pennsylvania was a Northeastern state. I mean, if Maryland is a border state, then it begs the question of what exactly it is bordering. For Maryland to be a "border" state, logic dictates that it borders a Northeastern state.



I guess. That just sounds odd to me. It would be like calling Northern Virginia "Greater Maryland."



What cultural traits? As a current New Yorker who grew up in Philadelphia and went to college in Boston, I can tell you that there are no "cultural" traits shared among these cities...at least none that go beyond mere historical artifact.

Pennsylvania has its own unique history. We are not the same as New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island. We were settled by Quakers, or the "Friends" as we learned in Philly public school ("Quaker" was considered a perjorative term during its time, but has more positive connotations today) and then later Germans. But none of this really has any bearing on whether the state is Northeastern, Southern or Midwestern. As a whole, I have always said that Pennsylvania is more characteristically similar to Ohio than it is to New York, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a Northeastern state.

The same could be said for Cleveland even...only in reverse. The Yankee Migration moved through Northeastern Ohio but not Southeastern Pennsylvania, yet Cleveland is considered the Midwest through and through and Philadelphia is considered the Northeast through and through. None of that changes because Cleveland has the Northern Cities shift while Philadelphia doesn't (though that appears to have changed in recent times).

It is all the same pie......the question is how to break it up. Among the most obvious would be a straight North/South divide based on slavery/Civil War allegiance. Using that definition, PA is the North, VA is the South, Maryland is obviously the border in between.

"Greater PA" is just my term for the Midland speech zone on the East Coast. The people speak the dialect because of the influence of PA. They eat faucnauts, or however you spell them, in places like Carroll County, MD. Never heard of the things in my life. Like I say, if you define a region, including "Mid-Atlantic" to include no real diagnostic traits (meaning some cultural trait that all, or nearly all, the individuals in the region share.) the group isn't natural and tells us nothing about the states or people included. It is worthless terminology, and the definition becomes a tautology:

The Mid-Atlantic region contains the states of NY, NJ, PA, MD, DE, VA, and NC, because these states are defined as being in the Mid-Atlantic region. We can do better.

And that to me is the rub, if folks want to construct regions that contains places that have nothing in common with each other, like a region that includes both NY and NC, they can, but that region than has no real meaning when used as a term to denote culture. Simply putting Sanford, NC and Scranton, PA in the "Mid-Atlantic" doesn't mean the people who live in these places have anything in common.

As for MD. We are what we are, and that is a small state squeezed between two pretty distinct and important cultural hearths, PA and VA. We can't really escape that. As I have said, I live in MD, but can see both PA and WV from my back window. It is inescapable that we are going to have an identity that is tied to these bigger fish. The downstaters can claim the Bay, Baltimore's urban culture, but really Maryland is defined by being in the middle......that is why they build the nation's capital on our land. We are the middle ground, the border state, whatever. We can hang our hats on good seafood, old bay, and some sports teams, but check out any cultural feature, dialect, cuisine, settlement patterns, economy, and is clear the MD portion of this region is almost always a small portion dominated by larger states. Only the Eastern Shore is large enough geographically to claim to be the center of its small world.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by Ball freak

The Northeast like any region is not a homogenous mixture. And the Mid-Atlantic...Pennsylvania, most of Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey share far more in common with the Northeast today than the South. The Northeast is not a homogenous mixture outside of Pennsylvania. Upstate New York and New York City are very different in speech patterns and history from New England. Upstate New York has the most in common with Pennsylvania. So let's just start taking as many states out of the Northeast as we can to prove Maryland isn't Northeastern. Maryland has speech patterns found only in the Northeast, politically and linguistically is more like the lower Northeast etc. if we are going to say Philadelphia is not the Northeast then we need to start saying Richmond and Charlotte are Northern cities. Westsideboy can't fathom that regions can have varieties of speech patterns, demographics, etc. The Midwest is like that. The South is like that. The West is like that. So why is the Northeast the exception. The Lower Midwest is as different from the Upper Midwest as New England is from the Mid Atlantic. Yet the two regions retain more similarities to each other than the Mid Atlantic and Lower Midwest do to the South. So why does it make zero sense to group them together. I don't get it and on here is certainly not where I will get my answer.

Can I call it a "blink" when you have something to say about my position, but refuse to address the posts where I answered your questions (which you still haven't attempted to refute) nor answered the questions I have of you.

I can fathom lots of things. The problem is when you argument has gone from "Maryland is like these places" to "Well, Maryland may not be like these other places, but that doesn't matter, they are still a region because regions don't have to share common traits," you have pretty much watered down what it even means to be a "region." If it is just lines on a map to you, fine. Regions are more than that to me, they are natural groupings of people and places that share common cultural traits.

Here is the dialect map again. Most of Maryland, and most of PA....including Baltimore and Philly are MIDLAND dialects, not Southern, not Northern, and certainly not "North Eastern" If you want to say MD has speech traits found only in the North East, I assume you don't mean the Midland dialect, which doesn't even extend to the border of NY. Tell me what you mean.