Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West PDF Author: William Cronon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393072452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…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." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West PDF Author: William Cronon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393072452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…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." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe

Changes in the Land

Changes in the Land PDF Author: William Cronon
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 142992828X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The book that launched environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, now revised and updated. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

An Analysis of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis

An Analysis of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis PDF Author: Cheryl Hudson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351352547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
What caused the rise of Chicago, and how did the city's expansion fuel the westward movement of the American frontier – and influence the type of society that evolved as a result? Nature's Metropolis emerged as a result of William Cronon asking and answering those questions, and the work can usefully be seen as an extended example of the critical thinking skill of problem-solving in action. Cronon navigates a path between the followers of Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the thesis that American character was shaped by the experience of the frontier, and revisionists who sought to suggest that the rugged individualism Turner depicted as a creation of life in the West was little but a fiction. For Cronon, the most productive question to ask was not whether or not men forged in the liberty-loving furnace of the Wild West had the sort of impact on America that Turner posited, but the quite different one of how capitalism and political economy had combined to drive the westward expansion of the US. For Cronon, individualism was scarcely even possible in a capitalist machine in which humans were little more than cogs, and the needs and demands of capital, not capitalists, prevailed. Nature's Metropolis, then, is a work in which the rise of Chicago is explained by generating alternative possibilities, and one that uses a rigorous study of the evidence to decide between competing solutions to the problem. 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.

The Third Coast

The Third Coast PDF Author: Thomas L. Dyja
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland Prize A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America—from Chess Records to Playboy, McDonald’s to the University of Chicago. Populated with an incredible cast of characters, including Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Sun Ra, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Turkel, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, The Third Coast recalls the prominence of the Windy City in all its grandeur.

Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature PDF Author: William Cronon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242528
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
A controversial, timely reassessment of the environmentalist agenda by outstanding historians, scientists, and critics. In a lead essay that powerfully states the broad argument of the book, William Cronon writes that the environmentalist goal of wilderness preservation is conceptually and politically wrongheaded. Among the ironies and entanglements resulting from this goal are the sale of nature in our malls through the Nature Company, and the disputes between working people and environmentalists over spotted owls and other objects of species preservation. The problem is that we haven't learned to live responsibly in nature. The environmentalist aim of legislating humans out of the wilderness is no solution. People, Cronon argues, are inextricably tied to nature, whether they live in cities or countryside. Rather than attempt to exclude humans, environmental advocates should help us learn to live in some sustainable relationship with nature. It is our home.

Roaring Camp

Roaring Camp PDF Author: Susan Lee Johnson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393320992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Historical insight is the alchemy that transforms the familiar story of the Gold Rush into something sparkling and new. The world of the Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film--of unshaven men named Stumpy and Kentuck raising hell and panning for gold--is one of half-truths. In this brilliant work of social history, Susan Johnson enters the well-worked diggings of Gold Rush history and strikes a rich lode. She finds a dynamic social world in which the conventions of identity--ethnic, national, and sexual--were reshaped in surprising ways. She gives us the all-male households of the diggings, the mines where the men worked, and the fandango houses where they played. With a keen eye for character and story, Johnson restores the particular social world that issued in the Gold Rush myths we still cherish.

Under Western Skies

Under Western Skies PDF Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195086716
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
ns explore our environmental history, uncover the role of nature and the land in the western past, and examine the West as the world's first multicultural society.

Division Street

Division Street PDF Author: Studs Terkel
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620979195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
A landmark reissue of Studs Terkel’s classic microcosm of America, with a new foreword by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and co-creator of the Division Street Revisited podcast “Remarkable. . . . Division Street astonishes, dismays, exhilarates.” —The New York Times When New Press founder André Schiffrin first published Division Street in 1967, Studs Terkel’s reputation as America’s foremost oral historian was established overnight. Approaching Chicagoans as emblematic of the nation at large, Terkel set out with his tape recorder and spent a year talking to over seventy people about race, family, education, work, prospects for the future—all topics that remain deeply contentious today. Subjects included a Black woman who attended the 1963 March on Washington, a tool-and-die maker, a baker from Budapest, a closeted gay actor, and a successful but cynical ad man. As Tom Wolfe wrote, Studs was “one of those rare thinkers who is actually willing to go out and talk to the incredible people of this country.” Most interviewees shared the hope for a good life for their children and the wish for a less divided and more just America, but the real Chicago street referenced in the title takes on a metaphorical meaning as a symbol of the acute social divides of the 1960s—and highlights the continued relevance of Terkel’s work in our polarized times. Now, over fifty years later, Melissa Harris and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mary Schmich have created the remarkable Division Street Revisited podcast, coming in January 2025, in which they have found and interviewed descendants of Terkel’s original subjects in seven rich episodes. Schmich’s foreword to the reissue and the extraordinary podcast—along with the new edition of Division Street—together demonstrate Studs Terkel’s prescience and the enduring importance of his work.

Alongshore

Alongshore PDF Author: John R. Stilgoe
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300060171
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
This cultural and historical study of the coast draws from a variety of sources to illuminate both the landscape of the shore and its place in American life. The work scrutinizes the fishing boats, lighthouses, wharfs, resorts, shipwrecks and people, to evoke the culture of the coast.

City of the Century

City of the Century PDF Author: Donald L. Miller
Publisher: Rosetta Books
ISBN: 0795339852
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1084

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Book Description
“A wonderfully readable account of Chicago’s early history” and the inspiration behind PBS’s American Experience (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Depicting its turbulent beginnings to its current status as one of the world’s most dynamic cities, City of the Century tells the story of Chicago—and the story of America, writ small. From its many natural disasters, including the Great Fire of 1871 and several cholera epidemics, to its winner-take-all politics, dynamic business empires, breathtaking architecture, its diverse cultures, and its multitude of writers, journalists, and artists, Chicago’s story is violent, inspiring, passionate, and fascinating from the first page to the last. The winner of the prestigious Great Lakes Book Award, given to the year’s most outstanding books highlighting the American heartland, City of the Century has received consistent rave reviews since its publication in 1996, and was made into a six-hour film airing on PBS’s American Experience series. Written with energetic prose and exacting detail, it brings Chicago’s history to vivid life. “With City of the Century, Miller has written what will be judged as the great Chicago history.” —John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times “Brims with life, with people, surprise, and with stories.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of John Adams and Truman “An invaluable companion in my journey through Old Chicago.” —Erik Larson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Devil in the White City