Today Common-place publishes a special issue on the early cities of the Americas. Guest edited by Gary B. Nash, the issue brings together some of the world's most eminent scholars of urban life to trace the early development of eighteen key North and South American cities, touching down in each at a point in time near the end of its second generation. The result is an urban kaleidoscope. From John Demos' study of Potosi, Bolivia, with its population of 100,000 in the 16th century, to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Boston in 1660, still a village of two thousand souls; from Christine Hunefeldt's Lima in the1760s, to Denys Delâge and Mathieu D'Avignon's Quebec ca. 1633, the essays range widely in time and space, prompting questions about what makes a city. Is it population size? Density? Diversity? The ways people make and buy things? And what, in the end, was the role of cities in the early history of what became the United States, a predominantly agricultural nation well into the twentieth century? Use our map to navigate an emerging urban America from South to North, West to East, from the 15th century to the late 19th and back, making stops in Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Chicago, Havana, Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New Amsterdam (New York), New Orleans, Paramaribo, Philadelphia, Quebec St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. All aboard for an interactive journey -- plus re-readings, reviews, columns, and more.

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