Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

by William Cronon

Overview

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

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393308730
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/17/1992
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	134,112
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

William Cronon is Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Chicago Tribune - 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

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

Wall Street Journal - David Shribman

"Thoroughly original…Illuminating…Brilliant."

Donald L. Miller

"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."

Boston Globe - Kenneth T. Jackson

"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."

The New Yorker - Verlyn Klinkenborg

In a fresh approach that links urban and frontier history, Cronon ( Changes in the Land ) explores the relationship between Chicago, 1848-1893, and the entire West, tracing the path between an urban market and the natural systems that supply it. Examining commodity flows--meat, grain, lumber--and the revolution in transportation and distribution, the book chronicles changes in the landscape: cattle replace buffalo; corn and wheat supplant prairie grasses; entire forests fall to the ax. Thus Wyoming cattle, Iowa corn and Wisconsin white pine come together in Chicago. City and countryside develop in tandem. Cronon notes that gateway cities are a peculiar feature of North American frontier settlements and the chief colonizers of the Western landscape. He compares the world of rural merchants in the pre- and post-railroad eras, and cites the McCormack reaper works to illustrate the sale of manufactured goods to the hinterland. The culmination of this dynamic period is in the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Readers interested in the growth of capitalism will find this an engrossing study. Photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Cronon (history, Yale) investigates the relationship between Chicago and the rural areas that comprised its hinterlands during the 19th century in terms of commodity flows--grain, lumber, and meat. Although the focus is on Chicago, the economic transformations he describes took place in many areas. His analysis is at its clearest in relating how the building of railroads led to a revolution in the grain trade and to the Chicago Board of Trade's dominance of grain prices. Soundly grounded in original sources, especially the federal court bankruptcy records used to map capital flows, this well-written study is a significant addition to the literature on U.S. economic history and should be acquired by all academic libraries.-- Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette

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