Exploring the Belt regions of the United States: Geography and significance

When looking at a map of the US you can divide it in various ways. Regions, states, counties, urban or rural, among others. But one specific one is belts. You may have heard of some before like the Rust Belt, in the past commonly known as the Manufacturing Belt, or the Steel Belt, Northeastern and Central Northern states where heavy industrialization and some economic stagnation is now common. Or the Bible Belt, a collection of states where specifically in the American South, Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestantism are prevalent. Now, calling it a division of the country is kind of wrong. This is more of a way of labeling specific areas of the country. Some overlap and some areas don't belong to any specific belt. But what is a belt? The belt regions of the United States are portions of the country that share certain characteristics. The belt terminology was first applied to growing regions for various crops which often follow lines of latitude because those are more likely to have similar climates. The allusion was to a long clothing belt since they roughly took those shapes on a map. The usage has expanded since then to other climate, economic, and cultural shared characteristics, plus these regions are not formally defined. At least that's the Wikipedia definition. So which are these belts? There's at least 20 of them, so get ready for me quickly reading off this list so we get to know them all by name alphabetically there are the following belts the Banana Bible Black Borscht Corn Cotton Fruit Frost Indiana Gas Jello Lead Pine Pretzel Rice Rust Salt Snow Stroke Sun Unchurched and wheat among a few others now we're not going to cover all of them in this video i think they will be a little boring and repetitive instead i chose around nine or ten that i think teach us something interesting about these areas that make up the belts. So let's jump into it, starting with the Bible Belt. The Bible Belt is a part of the Southern United States and includes one Midwestern state, Missouri. Here, conservative Protestant Christianity is very influential and people attend church more than in other parts of the country. In it, fewer people identify as non-religious compared to the West and Northeast regions. For example, only 12% of people in Alabama say they're not religious, while Tennessee has the highest percentage of Evangelical Protestantism at 52%. The influence of this religion is strongest in certain parts of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, South Carolina and even stretching as far as Texas. The term Bible Belt was first used by American journalist H.L. Mencken in 1924 and he meant that religious beliefs were strongly held in this area. This is connected to the early rural nature of the region as well as specific evangelical movements which began in the 1800s. Now it's used in other countries too to describe regions with strong religious beliefs such as the Netherlands. These usually have political implications with states or regions belonging to them usually voting more conservatively. On the opposite end we have the unchurched belt, which was labeled in opposition to the Bible Belt, defining states where religion isn't as important. In 1985, researchers found that California, Oregon and Washington had pretty low church membership rates. By 2000, several states including Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Nevada and West Virginia also began reporting even lower religious adherence. By 2006, Nevada and New England had the lowest church attendance rates, followed by Oregon, Washington and California. A 2008 Gallup poll even showed that belief in God was also lower in the Western United States when compared to other regions of the country. However there's still debate whether the Western United States is still the most irreligious region as New England now has more people unaffiliated with any faith. And in addition, although one wouldn't tell just by the name, we have the Jello Belt. This one is also known as the Mormon Corridor or the Mormon Belt, portraying Western states with a large Mormon population. Apparently it's called Jell-O due to a stereotype that these people like it a lot. Maybe that's what they're referring to in the Fallout TV show, when they have the Jell-O cake all the time in the vault. But anyway, it might not be so much of just a stereotype. Apparently, according to the Los Angeles Times, Salt Lake City holds the title of America's Jell-O eating capital. Mary Jane Kincaid of Kraft Foods, the maker of Jell-O, even stated that every resident of Salt Lake City, on average, purchases two boxes of Jell-O annually, which is twice the national average. Additionally, Utah residents consume also twice as much lime jello as anyone else in the world. The Church of Latter-day Saints, however, has not shown great affection towards the term. But this is what the belt is, the region of the US where Mormon religion is most concentrated. 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It includes areas like Western New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan's Lower Peninsula, Southeastern Wisconsin and small parts of Kentucky, New Jersey and the St. Louis metropolitan area in Missouri. The term rust belt refers to the decline of industry, especially steelmaking since steel rusts, automobile manufacturing and coal mining due to factors like deindustrialization, economic decline, population loss and urban decay, sort of in a vicious cycle where each caused all of the rest. While Boston and New York adapted and shifted their economy towards the third sector, many of these other states failed to. The term became popular in the 1980s, contrasting with the booming Sunbelt in the South, which is the next on our list. It includes the Southeast and Southwest regions of the US, with climates ranging from deserts to tropical zones. After world war 2 many people moved to the sunbelt seeking warm weather, retirements and job opportunities and still lots of people have been moving to the Sun Belt lately with 12 out of the 15 fastest growing US cities located there as of 2023. And what about the Black Belt? It stretches along specific counties of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and the Carolinas as well as Virginia. By 1894 political commentators used the term Black Belt so often that it was already very well known in the US. And by 1900 the term was commonly used to denote the geopolitical region. The 2020 census map shows us how this is still a reality today. Its origin is related to the social history of slavery and black labor within the southern region, which is coincidentally also known for its rich black soil, giving the second meaning to the term. This area historically centered around cotton plantations, also included tobacco, near the Virginia-North Carolina border. Controlled mainly by wealthy white people, the land was cultivated by predominantly black slaves, who often made up the majority of population in many counties. Following 1945, mechanization replaced much of the labor force, leading to the Great Migration of workers to cities in the Midwest and West instead. Despite changes in labor dynamics, the term Black Belt persists and the Cotton Belt, which is also known in the region, is necessarily connected to it for the same reasons. To wrap things up, and like I mentioned at the start, the concept first emerged with agriculture and farming, so what are some of those belts that still remain today? One example is the Corn Belt, which spans from Ohio to parts of Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. It includes portions of Minnesota in the north and Missouri and Kentucky in the south. Iowa and Illinois are the central hubs of the region, collectively producing a third of the nation's corn. A disproportionate amount considering its size, the reason being adequate soil and federal subsidies. Or the Wheat Belt, which almost divides the US in half and consists of the areas where wheat is the primary crop. The Rice Belt is another example, a stretch of counties that produces almost all of the rice in the US since it has the terrain and weather conditions that encourage it. And then we have other ones like the Frost Belt, a region known for its icy winters and heavy snowfall, it includes the entirety of New England and much of the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions. Which is different for instance from the Snowbelt, which is made up of three areas near the Great Lakes that get a lot of snowfall. The reason for all the snow is something called the Lake Effect Snow which happens when cold, dry air moves over the warmer water of a lake, picks up moisture and then drops it as snow when it moves inland. Each of the five Great Lakes actually has its own snow belt, Lake Ontario's is in upstate New York, Lake Erie stretches from Cleveland, Ohio to New York, Lake Michigan covers the western part of Michigan, and Lake Superior's includes northern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. So, those are the so-called belt regions of the United States, some defined and named based on economic factors, others on cultural or religious ones, and some due to the origin of the belt concept belonging to an area where a specific crop is grown. Here we mostly understood why the regions have these names. If you want to learn about why and how each belt came to be this way, like we did for instance with the Black Belt or the Bible Belt, I can also make dedicated videos on each. Do you agree with these belt regions or would you remove / add any states or part of states to them? In addition, are there any other interesting belts that you know of that I didn't mention here, either in the US or any other place. I know for instance India has a Hindi belt. Let me know in the comments. Thanks for watching this video, subscribe to catch future ones and I will see you next time for more general knowledge.