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Beyond Strömgren Spheres and Wind-Blown Bubbles: An Observational Perspective on H II Region Feedback

Massive stars produce copious quantities of ultraviolet radiation beyond the Lyman limit, photoionizing the interstellar medium (ISM) and producing H II regions. As strong sources of recombination- and forbidden-line emission, infrared continuum, and thermal (free-free) radio continuum, H II regions serve as readily-observable beacons of massive star formation in the Milky Way and external galaxies. Along with supernovae, H II regions are dominant sources of feedback in star-forming galaxies, injecting radiative and mechanical luminosity into the ISM. H II regions may prove more important than supernovae as triggers of star formation through localized compression of cold cloud cores. In this review, I give a broad overview of the structure and time-evolution of H II regions, emphasizing complications to the theoretical picture revealed by multiwavelength observations. I discuss a recent controversy surrounding the dominant feedback mechanism in 30 Doradus, the most luminous H II region in the Local Group. I summarize the first results from the Milky Way Project (MWP), which has produced a new catalog of several thousand candidate Galactic H II regions by enlisting >35,000 "citizen scientists" to search Spitzer Space Telescope survey images for bubble-shaped structures. The MWP and similar large catalogs enable empirical studies of Galactic H II region evolution across the full range of luminosities and statistical studies of triggered star formation.