![]() ![]() This shaping is primarily viewed through commodity flows, including the commodities themselves and how they were transported. Rather, it is a story about how the city shaped the Great West, while being shaped itself by the Great West. As he takes pains to make clear, Nature’s Metropolis is not a comprehensive history of the city or the Great West. This sounds like a cliché, but it is not one in Cronon’s hands. Rather, they are all an interdependent whole, each continuously changing the other. If Cronon has an overriding theme, it is that a sharp distinction between city and country, or between humans and nature, is an illusion, and a damaging one. I suppose to some this sounds boring-but as far as I’m concerned Cronon nearly magically retains the reader’s interest throughout. ![]() For each topic, he focuses both narrowly on how each developed and changed over time, and more broadly on how each affected the city and the larger Great West. He does this by analyzing, in fascinating detail, the city and its surrounding territory in three areas: transportation (water and rail), physical commodities (grain, lumber, and meat), and capital. ![]() ![]() Part history, part sociological study, part economic analysis, and part ecological survey, William Cronon examines the growth of Chicago by studying the city’s 19th Century relationship to the larger “Great West” (more or less the once-sparsely settled regions between the Ohio River Valley and the Pacific). This is a fantastic book that well deserves its reputation as a classic. ![]()
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