Independent Cities are cities with populations of 100,000 or greater, and are the main cities of MSAs of less than 2 million people. Because no cities in Delaware, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming or West Virginia fit this definition, we ranked the largest city in the state. West Virginia and Wyoming each have two cities of nearly identical size, so we included both of them. We did not drop any cities that were in the 1999 report even if their 2000 population dipped slightly below 100,000.

There are 140 Independent Cities with an average size of 229,000--about the size of Baton Rouge, LA. Laredo, TX has the highest proportion of children (35.5%) and Burlington, VT has the lowest (16.2%).