The region is linked by Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 1, which start in Miami and Key West, Florida, respectively, in the south, and terminate in Maine at the U.S.-Canadian border.

The global headquarters of many major financial firms, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Capital One, The Vanguard Group, and Fidelity, are located in the region.

[4] If Northeast megalopolis was a sovereign nation (2023), it would rank in terms of nominal GDP as the world's third largest economy, ahead of Germany ($4.7 trillion).

The Northeast played a significant role in the foundation of the United States during the late colonial era and in the American Revolutionary War.

Other significant events that occurred during the Revolution at this time in the region include the Second Continental Congress, the creation of the Articles of Confederation, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention.

According to Gottmann, capital cities "will tend to create for and around the seats of power a certain kind of built environment, singularly endowed, for instance, with monumentality, stressing status and ritual, a trait that will increase with duration.

[24] By contrast, the other major source of trans-oceanic immigrants was China, which was farther from the U.S. West Coast than Europe was from the East, and whose ethnicity made them targets of racial discrimination, creating barriers to their seamless integration into American society.

[citation needed] The concept of megalopolises originated with Jean Gottmann, a French geographer who wrote Megalopolis, a book whose central theory was that the cities between Washington, D.C., and Boston together form a sort of cohesive, integrated "supercity."

However, the dream of the city's founders, Gottmann argued, was being realized in the Northeastern U.S. in the 1960s with the ascent of the region to global political, academic, and economic prominence.

[26] Gottmann defined two criteria for a group of cities to be a true megalopolis: "polynuclear structure" and "manifold concentration"—that is, the presence of multiple urban nuclei, which exist independently of each other yet are integrated in a special way relative to sites outside their area.

Large communities on the outskirts of major cities, such as Bethesda in Maryland (outside of Washington, D.C.) and Camden in New Jersey (outside of Philadelphia), may be clearly distinct areas with even their own downtowns.

These ventures indicate not only the dual "independent nuclei"/"interlinked system" nature of the megalopolis, but also a broad public understanding of and capitalization on the concept.

National Geographic Society released a map in 1994 of the region at the time of the American Revolutionary War and in present day, which borrowed Gottmann's book's title.

In 1967, futurists Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener coined the term "BosWash" to predict that the region would emerge as the sort of megalopolis initially described by Gottmann.