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

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Cameron Blevins is Associate Professor, Clinical Teaching Track at the University of Colorado Denver. Many of the small farmers and laborers who were driven to the cities probably have exurban and suburban descendants for whom "Chicago" is still a dirty word, because of that city's (racialized) reputation for urban lawlessness.

He couches Chicago’s rise to prominence in terms of empire, quoting an 1880s Chicago newspaperman who wrote, “In ancient times [. 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. Cronon's writing here is also unusually personal, at times - he bookends the history with references to his personal experience growing up in the Chicago hinterland. Nature’s Metropolis makes for beautiful reading because of the laser-focused acuity that Bill lavished on every sentence, paragraph, section, and chapter (not to mention each endnote, data routine, and mortgage map).William Cronon weaves a series of spatial concepts throughout Nature’s Metropolis, including central place theory, “first” and “second” nature, and the geography of capital. The frame is explicitly economic, and much attention is paid to futures trading and loan debts; docks, stations, and mills. Reading this book so soon after The Box brought home a lot of lessons on how miraculous our current standard of living is: in some ways the Industrial Revolution has never ended, and the great wave of commerce that stretches back to the early 1800s has only begun for most of the world. Still, Cronon relies heavily on Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s concentric circle analysis, from 1826, of the zones that surround a city, from intensive agriculture closest to the city to wilderness at the farthest extent. Dr Cheryl Hudson holds a PhD in history from Vanderbilt University, where her work examined the political culture of Chicago, 1890-1930.

The way loggers created ice trails to move logs in the winter, and floated them downriver in the spring floods (a seasonal bottleneck that caused vast and dangerous logjams).When lumber ran out, it left behind vast despoiled regions in Wisconsin and Michigan, the “Cutover,” which contributed to vast forest fires, further destroying first nature—and killing lots of people, including (amazingly) something like 2,000 people at one time in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in 1871. I read the book ahead of my first ever trip to Chicago (and other parts of the American Mid-West) and the book certainly served as a good historical introduction to the area, especially the astonishingly fast growth of Chicago: the relationship between that metropolis and its natural hinterland is vividly described. So, after covering transport, Cronon turns to physical commodities, beginning with grain (primarily wheat). Currently a University Teacher in American history at the University of Liverpool, she has taught at universities in the UK and the USA, including Oxford, Sheffield, Coventry, Vanderbilt and Sussex and is a former director of the academic programme at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. If Cronon has an overriding theme, it is that a sharp distinction between city and country, or between humans and nature, is an illusion, and a damaging one.

But how might we reorient our perception of that history if we understand cities not as isolated sites of relative opportunity for African Americans, but as tied to their hinterlands? To Cronon, things change just as much when they move across space as they do when they move through time. As far as meat, this history is better known than Chicago’s history of lumber, perhaps because it lasted much longer, into living memory, if only as a shadow of its former glory. This is an academic book which describes in great detail the rise of Chicago from a fur trading post to a major metropolis capable of putting on a World’s Fair of great beauty, attracting visitors from around the world. The advent of coal-powered transportation was thus not simply an energy subsidy, but a qualitative change that enabled the imposition of a cultural land use ideal that brought serious changes to the ecology of the area.Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, Creating Abundance Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). S. history because Bill possessed the conviction and skill needed to make big, important ideas accessible. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. The force facilitating the increased pace of movement was abstraction, a concept not unique to this book but one which Cronon illustrates so well that the term gains new implications. But since it's bigger and meatier than any of those essays and even Changes in the Land, he can really dig into the details and let the little nuggets of philosophy emerge from the data and the stories he's communicating.