ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine the shape of power within the geopolitical history of the United States since its founding. We place the question of the urban in American political development within a wider context of the ways that cities and nations have developed interdependently, as first demonstrated by Max Weber and more recently by Charles Tilly and others.1 We map the historically developed national state within a network of cities, metropolises, and regions, and propose that there are two broad genres of “regime” that make up the nation. The national policy regime is, like “The New Deal,” an unstable coalition of regionally emplaced political elites who form their governing coalition with a theme and a distinct bundle of policy goals. Regional regimes organize the political economies of the regions that compose the nation state. Especially since the Civil War, these regional regimes have been dominated by leadership based in their respective metropoles. National policy regimes have produced regions and the regimes governing those regions have, at key moments, organized the governing coalitions of the national state, in effect nationalizing its region’s political culture.
