Buy this book with Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature by William Cronon today!

Buy Together Today: $28.50

A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America by Lizabeth Cohen  (8)

Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson  (10)  $13.57

The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (Critical Issue Book) by Richard White  (5)  $13.00

Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West by Donald Worster  (6)  $22.46

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s by Donald Worster  (13)  $12.89

› Explore similar items : Books (49)

Amazon.com
Cronon's history of 19th-century Chicago is in fact the history of the widespread effects of a single city on millions of square miles of ecological, cultural, and economic frontier. Cronon combines archival accuracy, ecological evaluation, and a sweeping understanding of the impact of railroads, stockyards, catalog companies, and patterns of property on the design of development of the entire inland United States to this date. Although focused on Chicago and the U.S., the general lessons it teaches are of global significance, and a rich source of metaphors for the ways in which colonization of physical space operates differently from, and similarly to, colonization of cyberspace. This is a compelling, wise, thorough--and thoroughly accessible--masterpiece of history writ large. Very Highest Recommendation.

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

First Sentence:
Before the city, there was the land. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
elevator receipts, livestock shippers, physical grain, dressed beef, cargo market, lumber district, wholesale butchers, grain grades, lumber trade, pork packers, grain traders, pork packing, country dealers, ice trade, regional metropolis, lumber market, disassembly line, lumber dealers, sawmill operators, metropolitan status, urban hierarchy Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Lake Michigan, Civil War, New Orleans, Chicago River, United States, Kansas City, Mississippi Valley, Montgomery Ward, North America, White City, Yale University Library, Rock Island, Black Hawk, High Plains, John Burrows, New England, Northwestern Lumberman, San Francisco, Courtesy State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Illinois Central, Illinois River, Prairie Farmer, Rocky Mountains, Uncle Jeremiah New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover |