The Midwest and Great Lakes Region offers an array of opportunities for those who reside there, and tourists as well. The landscape is painted with farmland, steep hills and rolling plains, dense forests with sparkling waterfalls and lots of lakes! The Great Lakes serve as a major transportation route but also an important recreational hotspot. Many fish, water ski, sail, snowmobile, and even dive among the shipwrecks! Cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit, which are filled with music, great food, and loyal sports fans, are fun to explore. So grab your camera and discover this diverse U.S. region. This book will allow students to identify the main purpose of a text, including what the author wants to answer, explain, or describe.

This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.

Catalog of the exhibition, "The Inlander Collection of Great Lakes Regional Painting," held at the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Mich.