ABSTRACT
A major theme of this chapter is the adjustment of the several civil communities to different frontier stages, from their founding on the rural-land frontier through the urban-industrial frontier and on to the metropolitan-technological frontier that engulfed them after the Second World War. The responses of both Duluth and Pueblo to the metropolitan frontier were influenced by the original Cities of the Prairie study, a fact that became known to the study team only in the course of the resurvey. A central premise of the Cities of the Prairie study is that the capacity of a particular civil community to function effectively within this broader political context is determined not only by socioeconomic factors but by its geohistorical and political cultural foundations. During the second half of the postwar generation, the geohistorical location of the cities of the prairie shifted substantially in its temporal dimension, albeit less so than the country as a whole, and modestly in its spatial dimension.
