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

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edu/postdoctoral-fellow) is the post-doctoral fellow in the history of capitalism and environmental sustainability at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. It is the best of both worlds, and as Americans have obtained the wealth to do so, this vision has been applied to much of the country – like the “middle class” that nominally inhabited them, “suburbs” have become more of a core American identity lifestyle than a descriptive term for near-urban areas. But Cronon also highlights how these relationships were dynamic and ever-changing and how Chicago’s rise as a gateway city for national and European markets muddles the city’s status as a central place.

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. Yet such linkages essentially explain the impacts that first nature takes from the interventions of second nature. 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).Post-emancipation African American history is closely tied to urban history, for good reason as thousands of former slaves and their descendants left the Jim Crow rural South for opportunity in places like Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. When individual logs were marked or branded for driving, this mark came to represent not just the value of the tree but also the value of the labor that went into producing the log. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

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. 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. 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. Tied not just in terms of the exchange of money for grain or lumber, as Cronon describes, but also in terms of family and kinship, with consequences both empowering and devastating?As he takes pains to make clear, Nature’s Metropolis is not a comprehensive history of the city or the Great West. Here he shows how Chicago’s capital net, the area from which it received financing, was much wider than cities that thought they were competing with Chicago, such as Milwaukee or Minneapolis, or even those that really were competing but ultimately came in second place, such as Cincinnati and St. In this section on capital, Cronon also examines the spread of the capital-intensive market for farm machinery, which relied heavily on the development of efficient credit markets. Cronon argues instead that it was New York investors' capital that made Chicago so great - though their selection of the city was no doubt initially swayed by some of the transit possibilities its location offered (a wonderful and unusual example of the social construction of landscapes and how it affects the land itself).

When I first read the book while training in labor history in graduate school, this lacuna was off-putting, as my margin notes express. Cronon’s point is, again, that a sharp division between “urban” and “rural” is a fiction—any city is a dynamic system of constant interplay and exchange between the two, and Chicago is a particularly dramatic exemplar of that principle. 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 Nature’s Metropolis, abstraction is, in short, when the material becomes intangible, fluid, and most importantly, more manipulatable by people. 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.

Unlike grain, though, lumber never developed the same type of ultra-efficient market, in part because it was never possible to fully standardize and turn fungible. 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. Cameron Blevins is Associate Professor, Clinical Teaching Track at the University of Colorado Denver.