![]() ![]() Those who sought to explain its unmatched expansion often saw it as being compelled by deep forces within nature itself, gathering the resources and energies of the Great West - the region stretching from the Appalachians and Great Lakes to the Rockies and the Pacific - and concentrating them in a single favored spot at the southwestern corner of Lake Michigan…a city destined for greatness by nature’s own prophesies: Nature’s Metropolis.įor a half century, Chicago played a unique role in vast changes in the food Americans ate, in the ways they shipped and traveled, in the types of goods they bought and sold, in the sorts of homes they built, in the methods they used to communicate and in the systems and schemes they developed to make money.Īnd not only Americans. No other city in America had ever grown so large so quickly none had so rapidly overwhelmed the countryside around it to create so urban a world. In his classic, ground-breaking work Nature’s Metropolis, published in 1991 and still the best book ever written about Chicago, William Cronon notes:ĭuring the nineteenth century, when Chicago was at the height of its gargantuan growth, its citizens rather prided themselves on the wonder and horror their hometown evoked in visitors. ![]() ![]() Chicago exploded onto the world in the mid-19th century, rising in a few decades from a lonely frontier outpost to an economic behemoth that, except for New York, exerted more influence and flexed more power by far than any other American city. ![]()
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