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In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon
gives us an environmental perspective on the history of
nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological
and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic
city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens
a new window onto our national past. This is the story of
city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system
so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and
transformed American culture. The world that emerged is
our own.
The catalysts in this process of historical
change are so familiar that we often take them for granted:
railroads, grain elevators, lumber camps and log drives,
stockyards, futures markets, and the traders, middlemen,
speculators, drummers, and boosters who built Chicago's
domain from the Appalachians to the Sierra Nevada. Familiar
as they may be, these innovations in technology and organization
combined to extraordinary effect. As agents of a voracious
economy, they found their raw material in the rich ecosystems
of the Great West -- the rivers and lakes carved by retreating
glaciers millennia before; the fertile soils of the tallgrass
prairie; the immense white pines of the north woods; and
the grasses and sedges of the high plains with their millions
of bison. In a frenzy of development that spanned the period
from before the Civil War to the start of the new century,
Americans cut vast stands of white pine into lumber, displaced
diverse prairie grasses with wheat, turned wheat into uniform
grades of grain, reduced animals to refrigerated meat, and
made these commodities the source of a powerful culture
of buying and selling, of debt, credit, and speculation.
At the center of this new economic culture was Chicago,
the gateway city to the Great West.
Americans have long had a name for areas
undergoing fundamental change: the frontier. But the frontier
Cronon describes is not the mythical one that has so long
gripped the popular imagination -- the westward-moving source
of America's democratic politics, open society, unfettered
economy, and rugged individualism, far removed from the
corruptions of urban life. Instead, Cronon's frontier is
a whirlwind of change with the metropolis at its very center.
Cronon does not ask us to hearken back to
a time when people lived in harmony with nature. There is
no easy moral here. But as we confront the ecological consequences
of economic growth in our world, Cronon's history of Chicago
and the Great West reminds us of our continuing responsibility
to acknowledge the critical connections between our urban
lives and the land that sustains us.
William Cronon is associate professor
of history at Yale University. Born in 1954, he was educated
at the University of Wisconsin, Oxford University -- where
he earned a D.Phil. as a Rhodes scholar -- and Yale University.
He is the author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists,
and the Ecology of New England (awarded the Society of
American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize) and the recipient
of a MacArthur Fellowship.
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