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

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Admittedly Nature’s Metropolis influenced countless historians, including myself, to use the word hinterland more than we should, and it probably convinced the same amount to make forays into geography. In Nature’s Metropolis, abstraction is, in short, when the material becomes intangible, fluid, and most importantly, more manipulatable by people. We can’t credit Cronon with conceiving of the idea of abstraction, but he can be credited with focusing attention on the mediums of abstraction and movement.

Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. Boosters appear again and again in Cronon’s work, both in Chicago and in other cities—men who preached the gospel of the inevitability of a city’s rise, and thus the opportunities available both for commerce and land speculation. Cronon’s focus is less on the famous individual exhibitions and more on how the Exhibition concealed the dependence of the city on second nature, and furthermore broadly concealed the web of relationships between the city and the Great West. I did not know that Hammond, Indiana, was named for a man who moved there to harvest vast quantities of ice, to refrigerate meat, from the Calumet River. Fox, A History of the Lumber Industry in the State of New York, USDA, Bureau of Forestry Bulletin no.But since it's bigger and meatier than any of those essays and even Changes in the Land, he can really dig into the details and let the little nuggets of philosophy emerge from the data and the stories he's communicating. The reader of Nature’s Metropolis, however, would be quick to wonder what might happen when student-investments are transformed from curious undergraduates into abstractions that can be traded on four-year future markets, or even bundled into investment vehicles. I've been really into economic histories lately, and this analysis of Chicago's development and its relationship to the Midwest it came to dominate was both staggeringly detailed and elegantly well-written. The frame is explicitly economic, and much attention is paid to futures trading and loan debts; docks, stations, and mills. Still, Cronon relies heavily on Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s concentric circle analysis, from 1826, of the zones that surround a city, from intensive agriculture closest to the city to wilderness at the farthest extent.

Nature’s Metropolis makes for beautiful reading because of the laser-focused acuity that Bill lavished on every sentence, paragraph, section, and chapter (not to mention each endnote, data routine, and mortgage map). This focus on commodities, distance, time, speed, and abstraction means that people are the least memorable part of the book.Cronon links the history of the city to its hinterland, and the way they are inextricably the same thing.