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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Region | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:21:18.006092+00:00 | kb-cron |
The field of historical geography involves the study of human history as it relates to places and regions, or the study of how places and regions have changed over time. D. W. Meinig, a historical geographer of America, describes many historical regions in his book The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. For example, in identifying European "source regions" in early American colonization efforts, he defines and describes the Northwest European Atlantic Protestant Region, which includes sub-regions such as the "Western Channel Community", which itself is made of sub-regions such as the English West Country of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. In describing historic regions of America, Meinig writes of "The Great Fishery" off the coast of Newfoundland and New England, an oceanic region that includes the Grand Banks. He rejects regions traditionally used in describing American history, like New France, "West Indies", the Middle Colonies, and the individual colonies themselves (Province of Maryland, for example). Instead he writes of "discrete colonization areas", which may be named after colonies but rarely adhere strictly to political boundaries. Among other historic regions of this type, he writes about "Greater New England" and its major sub-regions of "Plymouth", "New Haven shores" (including parts of Long Island), "Rhode Island" (or "Narragansett Bay"), "the Piscataqua", "Massachusetts Bay", "Connecticut Valley", and to a lesser degree, regions in the sphere of influence of Greater New England, "Acadia" (Nova Scotia), "Newfoundland and The Fishery/The Banks". Other examples of historical regions are Iroquoia, Ohio Country, Illinois Country, and Rupert's Land. In Russia, historical regions include Siberia and the Russian North, as well as the Ural Mountains. These regions had an identity that developed from the early modern period and led to Siberian regionalism.
=== Tourism region ===
A tourism region is a geographical region that has been designated by a governmental organization or tourism bureau as having common cultural or environmental characteristics. These regions are often named after a geographical, former, or current administrative region or may have a name created for tourism purposes. The names often evoke certain positive qualities of the area and suggest a coherent tourism experience to visitors. Countries, states, provinces, and other administrative regions are often carved up into tourism regions to facilitate attracting visitors. Some of the more famous tourism regions based on historical or current administrative regions include Tuscany in Italy and Yucatán in Mexico. Famous examples of regions created by a government or tourism bureau include the United Kingdom's Lake District and California's Wine Country. great plains region
=== Natural resource regions === Natural resources often occur in distinct regions. Natural resource regions can be a topic of physical geography or environmental geography, but also have a strong element of human geography and economic geography. A coal region, for example, is a physical or geomorphological region, but its development and exploitation can make it into an economic and a cultural region. Examples of natural resource regions are the Rumaila Field, the oil field that lies along the border or Iraq and Kuwait and played a role in the Gulf War; the Coal Region of Pennsylvania, which is a historical region as well as a cultural, physical, and natural resource region; the South Wales Coalfield, which like Pennsylvania's coal region is a historical, cultural, and natural region; the Kuznetsk Basin, a similarly important coal mining region in Russia; Kryvbas, the economic and iron ore mining region of Ukraine; and the James Bay Project, a large region of Quebec where one of the largest hydroelectric systems in the world has been developed.
=== Religious regions === Sometimes a region associated with a religion is given a name, like Christendom, a term with medieval and renaissance connotations of Christianity as a sort of social and political polity. The term Muslim world is sometimes used to refer to the region of the world where Islam is dominant. These broad terms are somewhat vague when used to describe regions. Within some religions there are clearly defined regions. The Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and others, define ecclesiastical regions with names such as diocese, eparchy, ecclesiastical provinces, and parish. For example, the United States is divided into 32 Roman Catholic ecclesiastical provinces. The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod is organized into 33 geographic districts, which are subdivided into circuits (the Atlantic District (LCMS), for example). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses regions similar to dioceses and parishes, but uses terms like ward and stake.
=== Political regions ===
In the field of political geography, regions tend to be based on political units such as sovereign states; subnational units such as administrative regions, provinces, states (in the United States), counties, townships, territories, etc.; and multinational groupings, including formally defined units such as the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and NATO, as well as informally defined regions such as the Third World, Western Europe, and the Middle East.
=== Administrative regions ===
The word "region" is taken from the Latin regio (derived from regere, 'to rule'), and a number of countries have borrowed the term as the formal name for a type of subnational entity (e.g., the región, used in Chile). In English, the word is also used as the conventional translation for equivalent terms in other languages (e.g., the область (oblast), used in Russia alongside a broader term регион). The following countries use the term "region" (or its cognate) as the name of a type of subnational administrative unit: