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

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Nonetheless, when rail arrived, and with it increased dominance of Chicago over other contenders such as St. Fox, A History of the Lumber Industry in the State of New York, USDA, Bureau of Forestry Bulletin no. 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.

Cronon’s focus is less on the famous individual exhibitions and more on how the Exhibition concealed the dependence of the city on second nature, and furthermore broadly concealed the web of relationships between the city and the Great West. spring wheat"), and futures trading at the Board of Trade revolutionized how farmers sold their goods, to the extent that Chicago is a world center of commodities trading to this day and the Midwest is some of the most productive farmland on the planet. Cronon navigates a path between the followers of Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the thesis that American character was shaped by the experience of the frontier, and revisionists who sought to suggest that the rugged individualism Turner depicted as a creation of life in the West was little but a fiction. Unlike the typical maps that appear in historical monographs, these maps don’t just show geographical context; they explicitly advance Cronon’s larger argument about the flows of capital that knit the region together.

Emerging from the theory-driven “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences in the late twentieth century, spatial history now encompasses digital methods such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software and data visualization. Excellent and fascinating review of the environmental history of the city of Chicago and its economic hinterland from the 1850s to the 1893 World’s Fair. Bill Cronon’s masterful study continues to inspire undergraduates and graduate students, environmentalists and commodities traders, academic historians and regular folks to see something of themselves in the first-person narrative with which Bill famously starts and ends his story—and, more important, to see their own world afresh through the lens of Chicago and the Great West. Nature’s Metropolis reveals present problems with media of abstraction and provides foresight into future problems.

Cronon repeatedly refers to, and reacts to, “central place theory”—attempts to systematize and base in mathematics the growth of urban-rural systems such as Chicago. In the words of novelist Theodore Dreiser, they were ‘life-hungry’ for the vast energy Chicago could offer to their appetites (13). 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). By crossing the boundary from country to city, one could escape the constraints of family and rural life to discover one’s chosen adulthood for oneself.There's a lot of great historiography here - a solid explanation of how the Chicago Board of Trade (i. The result was a backlash by farmers, most notably the Grange movement, who were incensed by what they saw as unproductive parasites profiting off the farmer’s labor. As water gave way to rail, more goods could be produced in more locations and shipped more quickly to the city for sale. Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2016).