ABSTRACT
The frontier-regional materials can thus be useful to sociologists as well as to historians. The Frontier and the City Land Speculation in Chicago the new cities were looked on as inviting locales for investment and speculation. Chicago was already becoming a place of considerable importance for manufacturers. Land booms have always attracted speculators to frontier cities. Objectively speaking there were numerous frontiers and, of course, numerous types of frontier cities. Some grew up on the rivers; some ran beside railroad tracks; some, like Butte, perched atop mines. In America, cities frequently began as frontier settlements. This was true of the earliest coastal towns, like Boston and New York, and later of large and small cities in every region of the nation. Sociologists, then, are increasingly going overseas to make their comparative studies, but have not yet begun to look at American urbanization with the same kind of comparative eye.
