Mother Jones magazine points out that, yes, the Upper Peninsula marches to its own drum beat

Sometimes it takes an outside point of view to make us take note of something we've always been unconsciously aware of. An article in Mother Jones noted, as some of us already knew, that the U.P. is actually isolated from the rest of the state and, yes, surrounded by water. The article is interesting, nonetheless, and even mentions the once-burning desire for the Upper Peninsula to break away from the Michigan and form the 51st state -- the state of Superior.

Excerpt: But there's a cultural element, too. For most of its existence, the UP has been isolated from the rest of the state, bordered by three of the Great Lakes plus Wisconsin, and accessible to the rest of Michigan only by boat until the late 1950s when someone finally built a bridge (and Yoopers, as natives of the UP are known, immediately began talking about blowing it up). Its industries are iron, copper, timber, and paper—and that's pretty much it; as Mike Delke, a woodcarver, told me at the UP State Fair in Escanaba, "You hear a lot of talk about depressed economic areas now. This has been a depressed economic area from the beginning."

For the rest of the story, read on.

Source: Mother Jones