K.T.'s Reviews > Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Very informative, very dense. Literally took me years to finish this tome. TLDR: beginning in the 1800s, railroads contributed immensely to Chicago’s growth and domestic influence as a gateway city to “the great west”; regular, predictable, year round schedules for the delivery of goods (and information) brought city and country closer together more quickly and at lower costs. And it all passed through Chicago. As products became more readily available the origin and processes that created it became more obscure/concealed resulting in essentially globalization lite (my own take, not Cronon’s words). After the Chicago fire the railroads once again created a definitive line and linkage this time between city and suburbs as the well- to-do used them daily to escape the urban squalor, vice, crime, pollution in favor of the civil domesticity of the burbs.

4 stars: Cronon makes almost no mention of the social movements of the time which undeniably shaped the cultural, social and labor relations flowing from the “metropolis”. Quite the omission given the length of this work.