City of Big Shoulders
A History of Chicago
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
City of Big Shoulders links key events in Chicago's development, from its marshy origins in the 1600s to today's robust metropolis. Robert G. Spinney presents Chicago in terms of the people whose lives made the city—from the tycoons and the politicians to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world.
In this revised and updated second edition that brings Chicago's story into the twenty-first century, Spinney sweeps his historian's gaze across the colorful and dramatic panorama of the city's explosive past. How did the pungent swamplands that the Native Americans called "the wild-garlic place" burgeon into one of the world's largest and most sophisticated cities? What is the real story behind the Great Chicago Fire? What aspects of American industry exploded with the bomb in Haymarket Square? Could the gritty blue-collar hometown of Al Capone become a visionary global city?
A city of immigrants and entrepreneurs, Chicago is quintessentially American. Spinney brings it to life and highlights the key people, moments, and special places—from Fort Dearborn to Cabrini-Green, Marquette to Mayor Daley, the Union Stock Yards to the Chicago Bulls—that make this incredible city one of the best places in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One wonders how Chicagoans have felt being saddled, since the 1920s, with the sobriquet "hog butcher for the world"--from the first line of Carl Sandburg's ode to the vitality of the second city. For this condensed yet energetic and substantial history of Chicago, Spinney has appropriately chosen the reference from Sandburg's poem's fifth line, to a "city of big shoulders"--for so much of the city's story emerges from the interwoven struggles of American-born and immigrant workers. Beginning with the earliest glimmerings of what was to become a major American city--Chigagou is a Native American word meaning "the wild garlic place"--this history moves from the influx of European missionaries, traders and explorers in 1673 to those who populated the preeminent boom town in the mid-19th century to the enormous tide of European immigrants who occupied Chicago in the latter half of that century. Spinney (World War II in Nashville), a former professor of history, has a firm sense of historical narrative as well as a keen eye for entertaining and illuminating detail. He deftly illustrates how differences in assimilation patterns affected city politics--the Poles retained their national identity amid tightly controlled neighborhoods; the Italians came to Chicago to work and then returned to Italy; while the Irish moved into positions of civil power. He also successfully draws upon important historical moments, such as the great fire, the Haymarket massacre, the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the careers of politicians like William "Big Bill" Thompson and Richard Daley, to illustrate the greater themes and struggles in the city's history.
