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

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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. by the time of The Grapes of Wrath the situation resembles the fully mechanized, depopulated oligarchies that many ag regions seem to be today.

William Cronon challenges many of the conventions of both urban and western history in this pathbreaking book, and does so with unusual intelligence and elegance. It is for all sorts of people to read about all sorts of things relating to early American life—from architecture to literature, from politics to parlor manners. African American urban migrants remained parts of extended families whose own networks stretched from country to city, from slavery to freedom. Nonetheless, when rail arrived, and with it increased dominance of Chicago over other contenders such as St.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. Just clarifying that capitalism did different bad things than 1800s farmers were trying to address). Yet in all these interv The empirical fact of America’s emergent urban sexual subcultures in the period is beyond dispute, even if this framing relegates them to the “second nature” of social forms freed from a static and ahistorical “familial constraint. Hefting it onto my lap for another read put me in mind of similar attempts to hold Eric Foner’s Reconstruction in just one hand.

Likewise, as the lumberjacks cut the pine trees of the north woods, lumber factories developed their networks in the city.And Cronon’s exclusion of African Americans from his later chapter examining motivations for rural residents to migrate to the city is curious indeed. Feel like I gained an understanding of the context of the Chicago-Detroit-Northern MI-WI landscapes and the history of my own family. Similarly, these processes operated through individual bodies sorting individual kernels of corn, but it was also composed of commodity flows where markets traded on the futures of those aggregated commodities. From Cronon’s use of spatial theory to the book’s more than two dozen maps and charts, Nature’s Metropolis foreshadowed the rise of spatial history in the decades to come.

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. The medium of abstraction created the conditions for the increased manipulation and exploitation of abstracted labor-time. Another chapter describes the lumber industry which was almost a city within the city and inspired loggers in Wisconsin and Michigan to reduce numerous pine forests to vast cutover districts. It seems limiting to place it in the context of the increasingly dysfunctional American political discussion, but even if you must do that there is a lot to chew on. 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).In Part 2, Cronon provides evidence of his thesis that big cities like Chicago grow and thrive within a symbiotic relationship with the rural hinterlands surrounding it. Boosters appear again and again in Cronon’s work, both in Chicago and in other cities—men who preached the gospel of the inevitability of a city’s rise, and thus the opportunities available both for commerce and land speculation. Rosenberg, “A Race Suicide Among the Hogs: The Biopolitics of Pork in the United States, 1865-1930,” American Quarterly 68, no. 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.