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

Product Information

Admittedly Nature’s Metropolis influenced countless historians, including myself, to use the word hinterland more than we should, and it probably convinced the same amount to make forays into geography. Cronon begins at the very beginning, when Chicago was merely a minor gathering place for American Indians and European traders, distinguished mostly by abundant wild garlic (the name “Chicago” is a corruption of a Miami Indian word for garlic—just the first of many things I learned about Chicago from this book, even though I lived there for 12 years).

Similarly, the growth of corn feeding and finishing as a value-adding process depended on the in-breeding of European shorthorns that added weight from grain-feeding efficiently. It is no exaggeration to say that Nature’s Metropolis changed the way that I comprehend the world, revealing the layers of fictions that sit on top of, and shape, labor, nature, and economic relationships in the past, in the present, and in possible futures. From the city, the railroads and lake barges can reach out and grasp anything it needs (the RTS connection again - every level must have workable distributions of every important resource). If you are looking for a specific Commonplace article from the back catalog and do not see it, or if have any other questions, please contact us directly.

Chicago’s role, and therefore its growth, was further enhanced by the Eastern rail systems terminating at Chicago and the Western rail systems originating at Chicago, requiring (at least initially) break-bulk trans-shipment through the city, which created all sorts of economic opportunities for local merchants and service providers, such as operators of grain elevators. This, together with mass centralized storage through the new technology of grain elevators, which allowed vastly lower holding costs, meant that fungible grain was traded easily and quickly, rather than trade necessitating the use of sacks of grain identified to a specific farmer until their final sale to the end user.

Nature's Metropolis, then, is a work in which the rise of Chicago is explained by generating alternative possibilities, and one that uses a rigorous study of the evidence to decide between competing solutions to the problem.If he had used some more modern work in urban development from someone like Ed Glaeser or Paul Krugman (who later wrote an excellent paper on this very book) I think readers would have benefited, but otherwise it was genius. Newspaper Account of a Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and Union Military Authorities, in New-York Daily Tribune, February 13, 1865, Freedmen and Southern Society Project, http://www. For the People can be profitably read as a sympathetic exposition of the various ways critics of American politics and society and adherents to popular sovereignty have been a mainstay of our political culture. A rare mention appears in Cronon’s third chapter, on grain, from Chicago boosters crowing about the efficiency of their city’s grain elevators; by comparison, they ridiculed the continued reliance in St. Cronon argues that our society's strict dichotomy between nature and city overlooks their tangled histories.

Chicago is central to and emblematic of our cultural answer to all existential questioning –that our meaning can be found in bending nature to the will of man such that we no longer recognize our constructs as nature's work. The roots of the modern environmental predicament are plainly visible in the economic dynamism that brought about the rise of Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century, which is a captivating story in its own right. The Chicago River existed, but was short, silted and access to it was blocked by a large sandbar (and, famously, it flowed the other way from what it does now). In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. I found this section of the book less fascinating, but that’s probably personal preference, since tangible goods are more interesting to me than abstract money (I am very interested in tangible money, however).

Provides a thorough review of the ways 1st nature (natural resources) and 2nd nature (capital) interact in the development of cities. Yet such linkages essentially explain the impacts that first nature takes from the interventions of second nature. In short, the redaction of animal reproduction in Nature’s Metropolis—its organization and regimentation—is the process by which animal sex is re-natured and narratively ascribed to a self-sufficient heterosexual nature. Nature's Metropolis emerged as a result of William Cronon asking and answering those questions, and the work can usefully be seen as an extended example of the critical thinking skill of problem-solving in action.

In the book’s appendix, Cronon spends several pages detailing the technical aspects of how he collected and mapped the data—an explicit emphasis on methodology that would define many future spatial (and digital) history projects.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. For more great content, check out our other projects, ( Just Teach One) and ( Just Teach One African American Print).