Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Creating the North American Landscape) [Hardcover]

Professor Thomas J. Jablonsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1992 | Series: Creating the North American Landscape

Based on archival sources, published scholarship and 84 oral histories, this book examines the Back of the Yards community in Chicago. Focusing on the period between the wars, the text describes the emergence of a sense of community, as adaption to the American life led to "pride in the jungle".

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Jablonsky has contributed a book that is a delight to read, that proposes an imaginative approach to understanding the growth of an empowering self-awareness among a local population, and that invites the critical scrutiny of all who are interested in one of the perennial and important issues of the American City." -- Peter GGoheen, Journal of Historical Geography

"A fascinating picture of daily life in the Back of the Yards." -- Harold L. Platt, Canadian Review of American Studies.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (December 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801843359
• ISBN-13: 978-0801843358
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,717,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bring back the memories, March 7, 2001

By 

Renee (Evergreen Park, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Creating the North American Landscape) (Hardcover)

It has been many years since I have visited my "hometown" of Back of the Yards. With each page I turned the past came more and more into focus. I could "see" the church that I attended and the parks where I played. I could taste the four-piece tamales that we got from the man on the corner with the pushcart. And I could smell the gasthly odors from the stockyards.

Every map in the book brought back even more pleasant memories. I could even locate the places where we lived. How interesting that my middle name is the name of the street where I was born; Elizabeth Street.

I have been working on our family tree and doing geneology studies and this wonderful book will help considerably with the project. I just wish it was not out of print as I would like to obtain copies for each of my five children.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Back of the Yards, December 18, 2004

By 

Polkadotty (Mountains of Western North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Creating the North American Landscape) (Hardcover)

My folks hailed from Back of the Yards and Pilsen, before they moved further west to Garfield Ridge and then on to Berwyn, Riverside and the outlying suburbs of Hinsdale, Downers Grove and Lisle. That said, you never leave the old neighborhood. It travels with you in recollections and oft-told tales. It was a hard life and folks had it rough, but it was a good life in many ways.

Family was everything, everything was for the family. That's why you got up early and worked like a dog ~ it was good to work, a privilege to have a job. You saved aside to get ahead and make your dreams come true. A home of your own, perhaps an automobile, enough to lay by for the future or send to the folks in the old country, or to share with the kids when it came time for them to get married and start their own family.

Home and God and Church and Armour and Swift and the Corner Store were the ballasts of one's universe Back of the Yards. This Jablonksy's unadulterated word-for-word-quoted interviews makes abundantly clear. Real people lived real lives Back of the Yards, all thrown together from all over the world. They made the best of it, they even thrived. Fond memories abound and a pang of regret still lingers now that the only physical proof of the once mighty, sprawling megacomplex of canneries, slaughterhouses, pens and factories that made up the Union Stockyards is the limestone gate at Exchange Ave. at Peoria St. An era ended, one that helped to build Chicago to what it is today and provided many of its immigrants a start and a foothold and a springboard to the future.

I recommend this as a mandatory companion to Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE. Offset the lurid and the purple and the melodramatic with truth and reality and the people who lived it. See the photos, read the interviews, look at the maps of the streets where hardworking, proud, hopeful folks made their homes and built their dreams there.

It's a source of pride to say you come from Back of the Yards, a place many truly never leave.