From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (July 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Heartland is used in geography to refer to the central areas of a country. This occurs in many nations and areas, such as Eurasia and the United States.

In Eurasia, the Heartland is remote and inaccessible from the periphery. The term Heartland has a particular importance in the works of Sir Halford Mackinder. He believed that the Heartland was the strategic region of the foremost importance in the world. See Heartland (geopolitics). In Canada, the "Heart land" area stretches from the City of Québec in the south-west to Windsor on the south-western peak of the Ontario Peninsula. That is one reason the area is sometimes called "Québec-Windsor-Axis".

The term Heartland is also frequently used to describe the Midwestern region of the United States. It is also used for other areas of the US which are culturally similar to the Heartland; for example, the Stater Bros. supermarket chain, which is concentrated in the Inland Empire counties of southern and central California, ran TV commercials for many years using the slogan "in the Heartland" to refer to inland counties such as San Bernardino County, Kern County and Riverside County being culturally more similar to the central United States than to coastal California. In the state of Florida is a region called the Florida Heartland, a six county region that is rural and in the south central part of the state.

In addition, the term can also be applied to the central region of any nation of economic, geopolitical or cultural significance. In Singapore, "Heartlanders" (as opposed to "Cosmopolitans") was a term popularised in 1999 by then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, to characterise the majority of the Singapore population that is generally poorer, less educated, either working class or lower-middle class, speaks a distinct variety of English (Singlish), lives in HDB housing estates, and has a local (rather than global) perspective on political, economic and cultural issues.