Using the shoe and leather industries as specific examples, Edgar Hoover here sets up a useful body of principles for the understanding of the location theory of economic activities, a theory that is basic to any analysis of problems of economic geography, with applications extending into the fields of transport and trade, labor policies, migration and resettlement, land economics, and city and regional planning. After a section devoted to a presentation of the theoretical framework of principles, he deals at length with the history of the location of the tanning and shoe-making industries in the United States. In his final chapters he discusses historical trends in location and gives a survey of certain directions in which locational theory should be developed in order to contribute to our understanding of monopolistic competition and to serve as a much-needed basis for the appraisal of policies involving control over the location of industries and people.