Indiana

A state whose southern half was settled from the slave states and whose northern half was not, which explains most of its politics since. Indiana was part of the Northwest Territory and therefore free soil, but migration came up from Kentucky and Virginia along the Ohio river valley, bringing southern speech, church affiliations and racial attitudes into the southern counties, while New Englanders and Germans settled the north via the Great Lakes. The 1851 constitution barred Black people from settling in the state. Tecumseh built the last serious pan-tribal confederacy here with his brother Tenskwatawa at Prophetstown, and its defeat at Tippecanoe in 1811 and Tecumseh's death in 1813 ended organised resistance in the region. Statehood came in 1816. The state's name means land of the Indians, and almost none remained after the Potawatomi removal of 1838. Indiana had the largest Ku Klux Klan membership of any state in the 1920s, with the governor and much of the legislature in its orbit, until the grand dragon's murder conviction in 1925 collapsed it. Steel at Gary and car parts across the north drove the economy. Indianapolis is the capital and its race the state's best-known event. The state is the smallest west of the Appalachians. Its residents are called Hoosiers, a word of disputed origin. Limestone quarried near Bloomington faced the Empire State Building and the Pentagon. Notre Dame is at South Bend. Indiana touches Lake Michigan along a short northern shore. The Indiana Dunes were made a national park in 2019 after decades of argument with steelmakers.

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