Natures Metropolis – Chicago & the Great West (Paper): Chicago and the Great West

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Rebecca Woods, T he Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

As far as meat, this history is better known than Chicago’s history of lumber, perhaps because it lasted much longer, into living memory, if only as a shadow of its former glory. Cronon clearly thinks that while the theory has value, central place theorists make claims of systematization that are inaccurate at best; the real world is a messier place than a mathematical theory allows for.This is an odd assumption, I would contend, because both the book and historians of sexuality are preoccupied with how capitalist modernity has formed American cityscapes. Cronon’s emphasis on the inseparability of city and country can be fertile ground for African American historians. The discussion of the grain, meat, and timber industries is a little less abstract and forms (to me) the heart of the book.

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). It is for all sorts of people to read about all sorts of things relating to early American life—from architecture to literature, from politics to parlor manners.Welcome to Commonplace, a destination for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. Cronon links the history of the city to its hinterland, and the way they are inextricably the same thing. The medium of abstraction created the conditions for the increased manipulation and exploitation of abstracted labor-time. by the time of The Grapes of Wrath the situation resembles the fully mechanized, depopulated oligarchies that many ag regions seem to be today.