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

Cronon, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393308731 ISBN 13: 9780393308730

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992

Synopsis

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

About this title

Review:

Thoroughly original...Illuminating...Brilliant.--Donald L. Miller

An intoxicating piece of scholarship and enterprise...It is really a work of biography: a look at the life of Chicago.--David Shribman

No one has ever written a better book about a city...No one has written about Chicago with more power, clarity and intelligence than Cronon.--Kenneth T. Jackson

This book is the story of Chicago's progress in the 19th century, the rough seduction of the hinterland, and how at its zenith the city ruled the commercial life of a vast inland region more completely and ruthlessly and profitably than any czar ruled Russia...A marvelous book.--Ward Just

Magnificent...the best work of economic and business history I've ever read.--Paul Krugman

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. More important, he helps lay the groundwork for a vital new field of scholarship: the history of the natural environment and its relationship to human society.--Alan Brinkley, Columbia University

Nature's Metropolis is that rare historical work which treats nature and the moral force we derive from it seriously...The roots of the modern environmental predicament are plainly visible in the economic dynamism that brought about the rise of Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century, which is a captivating story in its own right.--Verlyn Klinkenborg

Synopsis:

An American frontier study, focusing on the fastest growing city of 19th-century America - Chicago. It shows the land as it was when inhabited by Indians and a few white settlers, and the frenzied development of the meat-packing industry, the grain emporiums and the lumber markets which followed.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0393308731
• ISBN 13: 9780393308730
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592