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

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Taking his lead from Richard C. Wade, John W. Reps and other reinterpreters of Turner, Mr. Cronon reminds us that the settling of the American frontier was one of the most ambitious city building efforts in history, that along with farmers, ranchers and miners came merchants, lawyers and speculators, people who, in the words of an 1867 guidebook for pioneers heading west, "love the hum of crowded streets, the excitement of trade." For all these settlers Chicago became a gateway city connecting the new farms and towns of the West with the expanding industrial economy of the Northeast. Very interesting book, although at times it could get boring. I suppose if you are reallyinterested in economic history then it you may like it better. Here's the paper I wrote for class on it: WC: One of the things I actually love about the discipline of history is that historians are narrators. I honestly think we are the last explicitly narrative discipline left in the American academy (with the journalists, as well). Storytelling is no longer, in most disciplines, regarded as a serious undertaking. I believe that storytelling is inherently a moral activity. It’s about organizing events and characters and landscapes and settings so that a series of events becomes explicable in the sequence of relationships that are unfolding over the course of the narrative. And almost always the narrative has some lesson in mind. One of the beauties of history is that, although there have been moments in which historians have argued with each other about whether they are objective or not, objectivity is actually not the phrase most historians use the describe what they do. Our goal, it seems to me, is to be fair to the people whose lives we narrate. That means trying to see the world through their eyes. More fun example: Chicago's market dominance in the railway era led to the peculiar fact that Iowa, an area with rich agricultural land and a burgeoning population, never developed a large population center to market its goods - by the time of Iowa's growth, rail links to Chicago stretched across the entire state and any merchandise from wheat to live hogs could be in Chicago within 18 hours.

Starting in Illinois and Indiana, and moving west further in the country beyond the Missouri River, stood the high grass plains of Nebraska and Wyoming -- with a population in the 1860s of Native Americans and as many at 40 Million Bison. The "Slaughtering the Bison" began in earnest after the Civil War, with the arrival of the Union Pacific in Nebraska and Wyoming in the 1860s. Nature's Metropolis, William Cronon's highly original ecological history of the city of Chicago, covers the most explosive period of its growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it morphed from a prairie trading post into a vital, sprawling metropolis at the center of an industrial empire. He emphasizes the ecological interdependence of the city and frontier hinterlands, and the manner in which the dramatic spectacle of urban transformation often came at the cost of the depredation of the landscape and its wildlife.In Nature's Metropolis, I describe one aspect of the frontier experience on a very macro level: the expansion of a metropolitan economy into regions that had not previously been tightly bound to its markets, and the absorption of new peripheral areas into a capitalist orbit. Frontier areas lay on the periphery of the metropolitan economy, while cities like New York and London lay near its center. Chicago sat in between, on the boundary between East and West as those regions were defined in the nineteenth century. (p. xvi) It was a convenient and economical place for the managers of western railroads to establish their terminals. This enabled them to take advantage of connections with canal and river boats to the west, as well as to lake transports heading east, a competitive alternative to the eastern railroads. The eastern roads placed their terminals in Chicago because the city provided those water route links as well as an intersection with western railroads. I had an economic historian on my dissertation committee, a wonderful historian named Bill Parker, who said you really can’t do just Chicago, you need to do six cities so you can compare them, because otherwise you can’t make causal claims. You’re only making narrative, descriptive claims. (And that was OK with me; I’m OK with narrative, descriptive claims.) But I was very conscious that the story I wanted to tell about Chicago has analogs all over the world today. So the idea that there is a city that is serving as the interface between a much larger globalizing economy, a kind of colonial outpost with a set of emerging connections with a periphery, and that city is coordinating the transformation of the periphery on behalf of capital and power, that’s the story of modernity. And Chicago is an amazing example. But it’s not at all hard to see on the Pearl River Delta right now that story is unfolding. That story has unfolded in Brazil. It’s unfolded in many, many other parts of the world. Having now finished this book it is obvious why Nature’s Metropolis has the legendary status it holds. No longer would each place have its own time. Instead, under the time zone system, 3:22 p.m. in Chicago would also be 3:22 p.m. in Dallas, Texas, and in St. Louis, Missouri, and in Omaha, Nebraska. (But 4:22 p.m. in Toledo, Ohio, and 1:22 in Los Angeles, California.)

Excerpted as "Railroads and the Reorganization of Nature and Time" in Gary Kornblith, ed., The Industrial Revolution in America (1998) Basic example: Chicago outgrew St. Louis because its numerous westward rail spurs gave it easy access to western farmers, while its eastward rail links gave it easy access to eastern markets.Yet, despite the booster conception of Chicago as being extraordinarily favored by nature, the story of the city’s growth and impact is, as Cronon makes clear, much more complex.

There is in the life of any great city a moment when it reaches its maximum potential as a center of power and culture, when it becomes fully conscious of its special place in history. For Chicago that moment was 1893, the year it held the World's Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the New World and served to celebrate Chicago's role in the progress of American civilization. In that year the world's first skyscraper city had a population of over one million people, and among them was an early settler who remembered it as a desolate trading post of some 30 souls living between a swamp and a sand-choked river. Without ever leaving Chicago, this old man had moved, by 1893, from the country to the city, from an agrarian to an industrial America, and had lived, in the process, through the entire history of his still growing city.

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PDF / EPUB File Name: Natures_Metropolis_-_William_Cronon.pdf, Natures_Metropolis_-_William_Cronon.epub Chicago seemed an over-awing presence. It seemed a new kind of city, one that had arisen out of nothing — like magic — to wield immense influence across the midcontinent, across the entire nation, even across the oceans.

I wrote the first two chapters—the booster chapter and the railroad chapter—and in the meantime, after publishing Changes in the Land, I became well-known as an environmental historian and I was working on this huge book about Chicago that had nothing to do with environmental history, or at least I had hid everything that was about the environment. So I lost faith in the book. I’m somebody who cannot write if I don’t believe in what I’m doing. There was a three- or four-year interval when I was starting teaching and doing other things, and I just did not believe the Chicago book was what I wanted to be doing. And, since it was my Yale Ph.D. dissertation, I was in a bad situation.

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In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America’s most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own. Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon – eBook Details West of the city, the visual metaphor of the railroad map changed from trunk to fan, with lines diverging like rays from a central point to spread hundreds of miles north and south before continuing their westward trend….. My deepest moral project is to understand the world, which is a really complicated task, and my moral conviction is that rich understanding of the world leads to better, more responsible and just action in the world. We so often act on the basis of our own mythic conceptions; we believe our own lies, and we’re forever lying to ourselves because we want the world to conform to our convictions. Not letting ourselves do that is part of acting morally in the world. Among Cronon’s best points comes in his conclusion. The entire book details the nation-shaping interactions between city and hinterlands, a clear dichotomy that was quite clear to 19th century Midwesterns, though they defined it in tropes and narratives quite different from the ones Cronon’s analysis suggests. The book draws to a close as Chicago’s hegemony wanes, but also as the dichotomy is eroded by a new hybrid category: the suburb. The suburb combines the quality of life, the luxuries and access to market goods found in the city with the fresh air, tight-knit communities, and picturesque landscapes ascribed to rural America.