Where is it?

Michigan's Upper Peninsula

The Upper Peninsula (or U.P.) of Michigan is the landmass separating Lake Superior on the north from Lakes Michigan and Huron on the south and southeast. You know, that pointy part just below Canada near the top of maps of the contiguous portion of the U.S. The U.P. stretches about 330 miles east-west, and spans about 160 miles north-south. You can’t miss it.

Randolph AFB doesn't seem to know the Upper Peninsula exists. Or maybe they're trying to hide it from unfriendlies?

Or maybe you can miss it, depending on what map you’re looking at. The Upper Peninsula sometimes gets left off of maps drawn by the hasty and the ignorant, such as Randolph Air Force Base, which you’d like to think knows the full extent of the territory they’re supposed to protect.  Similarly, the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies don’t seem to spend much time in their own reference sections, although they went to the trouble to demonstrate their awareness of the existence of the Virgin Islands and American Samoa, for Pete’s sake.

Don't look to State Libraries for your maps!

Sometimes the omission of the Upper Peninsula is intentional. With only about 3% of Michigan’s residents, it’s easy to see how the U.P. can be overlooked, and state politicians in Lansing, Michigan’s capital, routinely do just that. As recently as last year, some state-sponsored tourism commercials completely omitted the U.P. in maps. Considering that a hefty percentage of the U.P.’s income is derived from tourism, the attempt by the State to steer tourists only to the Lower Peninsula was particularly insidious.

Part of Michigan? Part of Minnesota? A separate state that EnergyStar.gov doesn't know the name for?

Lots of maps include the Upper Peninsula, but don’t identify it with a label.  If it’s colored the same as the Lower Peninsula, that can sometimes work.  But here’s an example from the EnergyStar.gov website.  Someone unfamiliar with the Great Lakes geography would have a difficult time distinguishing land from water in this map.  Even if they know which portion is land, it’s unlabeled, and the same color as both Michigan and Minnesota.  Which does it belong to? It doesn’t touch either one.  Maybe it’s a separate state!

In fact, that seems to be a recurring problem on Federal websites, which you’d think would know the number, names, and locations of states within their fiefdom.  Here are a couple more examples, from the Environmental Protection Agency (left) and National Science Foundation (right) websites.  At least on these maps it’s clear that the Upper Peninsula is land.

The EPA (left) and NSF (right) don't seem to know what label to apply to the Upper Peninsula.

Here’s a map from someone who thinks the U.P. is separate from all the surrounding states, but doesn’t have a clue what it should be called. The closest labeled state with the same color is Indiana, but certainly they can’t be implying that the U.P. is part of Indiana, right?

The unnamed 51st state!

Don’t be so sure. Last year Pearson Prentice Hall, which refers to itself as “The World’s Leading Education Publisher”, published a high school textbook (United States History: Modern America) with a map labeling the territory of the Upper Peninsula as Illinois! Can you imagine what’s in their arithmetic books?	Textbook (2008) map by Prentice Hall, self-proclaimed "World's Leading Education Publisher".
Perfect! Was that so hard?	Now this is nice! I suppose for a lot of maps and charts it’s not convenient to rotate or arc text, but this map makes it clear what’s what.

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How most Michigan residents see the state, with the U.P. completely omitted. From Wikipedia's entry on "Northern Michigan".

State politicians aren’t the only people in Michigan who are unaware of the Upper Peninsula. Most of the state’s population lives less than 100 miles north of either Ohio or Indiana, and see’s Michigan as portrayed in Wikipedia’s entry “Northern Michigan”. The Upper Peninsula doesn’t even appear on the map. How could it? Once you’ve identified the mid section of a territory with the word “Northern”, there isn’t really any other word you can use to describe something even farther to the north. They’d have to call the U.P. something like “Even Northerner” Michigan, which exposes their initial labeling error and is awkward to boot. No, it’s much more convenient for them to simply leave off the U.P. entirely and not have to deal with the issue.

Grayling, located almost exactly half the distance between the latitudes of the southern border of Michigan and the northern tip of the Keewenaw Peninsula (in other words, situated at the exact north-south center of the state), likes to call itself “the heart of northern Michigan.”   Why?  Well, I guess they needed some sort of term, and the “Far East” and “Deepest Congo”, while both equally as accurate and appropriate as “Northern Michigan” when it comes to Grayling, were already taken.