Natures Metropolis – Chicago & the Great West (Paper): Chicago and the Great West

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You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. This point is central to how the book describes the moralized meanings ascribed to the nature/culture boundary. The physical worlds emerging from this assemblage—Chicago, most notably—were no less “nature,” but they were nevertheless a “second nature,” a human redirection, if not mastery of “first nature” (xix). Yet in all these interv

It is a history of how the movement of commodities and capital remade the geography of Chicago, its hinterland, and the larger United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. In short, Cronon argues, the city and country landscapes defining the American West did not grow in isolation.

This book is the story of Chicago''s progress in the 19th century, the rough seduction of the hinterland, and how at its zenith the city ruled the commercial life of a vast inland region more completely and ruthlessly and profitably than any czar ruled Russia. This is the same history of sexuality John D’Emilio provided in “Capitalism and Gay Identity” and that George Chauncey offers in Gay New York, although one in which sexuality is hustled in through euphemism. Nineteenth-century Americans, of course, understood precisely this “triumph” over “nature” and “the constraints of family” in explicitly sexual terms, with the race, gender, and class-mixed spaces of urban America, and Chicago in particular, a major source of sexual anxiety and “appetite. Rebecca Woods, T he Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

The Chicago Board of Trade was intimately involved with these developments, which further resulted in the creation of the allied futures market, with its ability to reduce risks for farmers and provide additional liquidity for the market—and, not incidentally, to make huge fortunes for speculators and those willing to risk trying to corner the market. Chicago's rise depended largely on its position as a hub, transit point, and eventually a market for grain, lumber, meat, and other product flows. This development went hand-in-hand with the concurrent rise of digital history, a methodological embrace of computers to analyze and communicate history.S. history because Bill possessed the conviction and skill needed to make big, important ideas accessible.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Likewise, examining these commodity markets in the context of how they shaped the geography of Chicago and the Great Lakes region underscores Cronon’s thesis that no other city played as significant a role as Chicago in developing the mid-continent during the second half of the 19th century. Dr Cheryl Hudson holds a PhD in history from Vanderbilt University, where her work examined the political culture of Chicago, 1890-1930. In a similar vein, the new suburbs were designed to offer a polished, sanitized version of the nature whose modification and production made the city possible.But for those of us who specialize in African American history, this, too, at first seems to be another one of those topics on which Cronon will have “little to say. To Cronon, things change just as much when they move across space as they do when they move through time. e. only seeing flows of bad debt) by studying periods after economic shocks, because of their exogeneity—but I think it's still a little hand-wavey. Throughout the book, he takes his readers by the hand and tells them stories that reveal the marvels of such seemingly banal topics as railroad rate-setting, commodities markets, and capital flows. What caused the rise of Chicago, and how did the city's expansion fuel the westward movement of the American frontier – and influence the type of society that evolved as a result?

This is an important, fascinating history of Chicago and the west, of its businesses and industries, its ecologies and environments.This is a perfect book in my mind and, and it has inspired some excellent reviews here, many of which provide useful overviews and reviews of its contents.