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

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A great example of this is the eradication of the buffalo and their replacement with longhorn cattle, or the growth of new types of wheat in the Midwest. Thirty years after its publication, Nature’s Metropolis remains a must-read for any serious student of U. Here, Cronon explores the role that rhetoric and propaganda play in creating divides in the popular imagination between urban and rural, or nature and industry.

Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and History at Duke University. Yet such linkages essentially explain the impacts that first nature takes from the interventions of second nature. In short, Cronon argues, the city and country landscapes defining the American West did not grow in isolation. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, Creating Abundance Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 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.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.

e., the commodities market) works, and a very impressive analysis of, wait for it, 19th century bankruptcy records. 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 [. Von Thünen, an economist, was focused on the economic viability of production, particularly as dictated by the cost of transport of different types of goods produced in different areas. But I agree the most with the 3 star one which states in a much longer context for particulars that this book is Far more essential and crux core essence for fact and real purpose/cores of truth than it is fun to read about.Its ideas about landscape beauty, about the appropriate distance of one’s house from one’s neighbors, about the proximity of industry, have shaped our contemporary landscape we inhabit in profound ways. 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. 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. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Cronon shows what happens when configurations of atoms—a bushel of wheat, a pork belly, or a log—become a numerical value.

The history of environment and the history of sexuality are subfields of American history that arguably share less conversation than any two other subfields I can name. A bit less formal than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Commonplace speaks—and listens—to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900. In Nature’s Metropolis, abstraction is, in short, when the material becomes intangible, fluid, and most importantly, more manipulatable by people. 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?

Many years after my initial foray into this justly treasured book, its crystalline quality continues to impress me as the wellspring of its many wonders.