Short answers, pulled from the story.
The U.S. Census Bureau defines the Midwest as twelve states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The bureau further divides them into the East North Central states and the West North Central states.
The Midwest is called the Heartland as one of several names for the region, alongside the Midwest, the American Midwest, Middle America, and the dated Middle West. It occupies the northern central part of the United States and was officially named the North Central Region by the U.S. Census Bureau until 1984.
The 2020 United States census put the population of the Midwest at 68,995,685. Chicago is the most populous city in the region and the third-most populous in the United States, with the Chicago metropolitan area estimated at 9.4 million residents.
The term West was applied to the region in British America and the early United States, when British colonial territories had not extended far from the Atlantic coast and the Pacific seaboard was generally unknown. By the early 19th century, anything west of the Appalachians was considered the American frontier.
The Midwest is known as the breadbasket because its fertile soil and the steel plow let farmers produce abundant grain and cereal crops including corn, wheat, soybeans, oats, and barley. Much of the region forms part of the United States' Corn Belt, where corn has been the predominant crop since the 1850s.
The Northwest Ordinance region, the heart of the Midwest, was the first large region of the United States to prohibit slavery, with the Ohio River as the border between freedom and slavery. Ohio provided the primary routes for the Underground Railroad, which by one estimate had helped 100,000 slaves escape to freedom by 1850.