The Great Lakes region of North America includes the eight U.S. states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well as the Canadian province of Ontario. The region borders the Great Lakes and forms a distinctive historical, economic, and cultural region. The Great Lakes Commission, authorized by the eight American states and Ontario, confirmed by the Canadian and American federal governments recognizes a formal U.S. - Canadian International Great Lakes Region, with the additional inclusion of the Canadian Province of Quebec.
The Great Lakes Region takes its name from the corresponding geological formation of the Great Lakes Basin, a narrow watershed encompassing The Great Lakes, among watersheds to the region's north (Hudson Bay), west (Mississippi), east and south (Ohio). To the east, the rivers of St. Lawrence, Richelieu, Hudson, Mohawk and Susquehanna form an arc of watersheds east to The Atlantic.
The Great Lakes region, as distinct from The Great Lakes Basin, defines a unit of political entities defined by the U.S. states and the Canadian Province of Ontario encompassing the Great Lakes watershed, and bordering one or more lakes.
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Famous quotes containing the words lakes and/or region:
“While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita to them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)