We review historical patterns of economic geography' for the United States from the colonial period to the present day. The analysis is framed in terms of two geographic scales: regions and cities. The compelling reason for studying geographic areas of different scales is that models that...

The presence of a westward-moving frontier of settlement shaped early U.S. history. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the Frontier Thesis and identify its long-run implications for culture and...