Economist Alfred Marshall described it in 1890 without fully explaining it: when an industry concentrates in one place, "the mysteries of the trade become no mysteries... but are as it were in the air." Route 128 had three times Silicon Valley's tech workforce in 1965 -- and lost the lead within a decade anyway.

Benjamin Franklin started a weekly debate club at 21 because he and his friends couldn't individually afford the books to argue from real reading. Pooling their money instead created the first successful lending library in the American colonies in 1731 -- practice creating the demand that built the institution.

The Army built Richland, Washington from a town of a few hundred people in 1943 to produce the plutonium that went into the Nagasaki bomb. The cleanup bill for that same site is now $578 billion and still rising.

Nevada built an entire city from scratch in 1931 just to house Hoover Dam's workforce. In 2014, the state gave Tesla $1.3 billion to build a different kind of power plant -- the Gigafactory.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that 3.25 million acres of eastern Oklahoma never legally stopped being a reservation, no matter how long the state had treated it otherwise. Roughly a million Oklahomans, including 400,000 in Tulsa, found out overnight they'd been living on a federally recognized reservation the whole time.

Three men founded an airplane company in Wichita, Kansas in January 1925 -- a city with no coastline and no obvious advantage for building aircraft. By 1928, one in four airplanes built in the United States came from there.

The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant enriched uranium for the Cold War nuclear arsenal from 1954 until 2001. Cleanup is still underway today, even as the same land becomes a 10-gigawatt AI data center.

Alabama sent three Black men to Congress in the 1870s, then none for 116 years after its 1901 constitution was rewritten explicitly to "establish white supremacy... by law, not by force or fraud." It took until 2024 for a second Black-majority district to come back around.

Destineer, a video game studio founded in a Twin Cities suburb in 2001, grew into a Global Top 25 publisher -- and its military-simulation studio built actual training simulations for the US Marine Corps, with active-duty Marines as technical advisors.

Epic Systems has never gone public and rarely talks to the press, but it holds the medical records of more than 280 million people -- over 80% of the US population -- as the largest electronic health records vendor by market share. It still runs privately from a 1,100-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin.

Missouri predicted the winning presidential candidate in 25 of 26 elections from 1904 to 2004 -- a streak that ended in 2008. The state's new congressional map splits Kansas City, one district for nearly 60 years, into three, each merged with land 200 miles away.

MacDill Air Force Base, inside Tampa city limits, houses both CENTCOM and SOCOM -- the commands that run US military operations across the Middle East and special operations worldwide. Defense spending tied to the base brings an estimated $7.5 billion to the Tampa Bay area, making it a lot more than the beach city most people picture.