Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

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.

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• Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
• Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
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• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
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• Shaped by the West, Volume 2: A History of North America from 1850
• The New Geography of Jobs
• The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit - Updated Edition (Princeton Classics)