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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. 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. 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). 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. The sanitized syntax of “intensivity” conceals the technologies, not to mention visceral interspecies interactions, necessary for all this mating to be made.It seems so obvious when stated that way, but Cronon finds himself debunking ignorant anti-capitalist myths even during the 1800s (not to say he's pro-capitalist, necessarily. A leader in the field of digital history, he is the author of Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (2021). This is a perfect book in my mind and, and it has inspired some excellent reviews here, many of which provide useful overviews and reviews of its contents.

Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1945). Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great Westis a nonfiction book published in 1991 by American author and environmental historian William Cronon. From real estate speculation in the 1830s to the coming of the railroads a few decades later, many of the changes to Chicago were financed by investors in the east.Much has already been written about black life in Chicago, particularly during the First and Second Great Migrations. Undetermined; published in The Chicago Defender on September 4, 1920, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. Cronon's writing here is also unusually personal, at times - he bookends the history with references to his personal experience growing up in the Chicago hinterland.

With grain, too, Cronon talks much about how the changing demand and structure of the grain market changed nature—this book is, after all, titled Nature’s Metropolis. 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. Without boosters, Chicago would not necessarily have grown as it did, or ultimately occupied the position it does.When lumber ran out, it left behind vast despoiled regions in Wisconsin and Michigan, the “Cutover,” which contributed to vast forest fires, further destroying first nature—and killing lots of people, including (amazingly) something like 2,000 people at one time in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in 1871. These explanations can take examples from somewhat peculiar cases like commodity flows between a city and its country. Emerging from the theory-driven “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences in the late twentieth century, spatial history now encompasses digital methods such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software and data visualization. It is also a fine work of interpretation, for a large part of Cronon's argument revolves around his attempt to define exactly what is rural, and what is urban, and how the two interact to create a novel economic force. Thirty years after its publication, Nature’s Metropolis remains a must-read for any serious student of U.