But Cronon’s melding of geographical and historical analysis to illuminate the environmental, urban, and economic history of the United States has ensured that, thirty years later, Nature’s Metropolis remains an enduring model for spatial historians following in his path. In Part 2, Cronon provides evidence of his thesis that big cities like Chicago grow and thrive within a symbiotic relationship with the rural hinterlands surrounding it. In a similar vein, the new suburbs were designed to offer a polished, sanitized version of the nature whose modification and production made the city possible. Excellent and fascinating review of the environmental history of the city of Chicago and its economic hinterland from the 1850s to the 1893 World’s Fair.

But the major concerns of Nature’s Metropolis are sometimes assumed to be remote to those that concern historians of sexuality. The logistical improvements described as “the annihilation of space” were coextensive and interwoven with these bodily transformations. Nature’s Metropolis is known to many historians as a classic of environmental history and, as Cameron Blevins will point out here, spatial history.Newspaper Account of a Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and Union Military Authorities, in New-York Daily Tribune, February 13, 1865, Freedmen and Southern Society Project, http://www. The way railroads stopped near Northern lakes to refill refrigerator cars with ice cut from lakes thawed months before.

Cronon enlivens what can at times be dry historical material with stories about the inventions and the technology that accelerated change in the American west like the the refrigerated railroad car, barbed wire, and the balloon frame house. In short, the redaction of animal reproduction in Nature’s Metropolis—its organization and regimentation—is the process by which animal sex is re-natured and narratively ascribed to a self-sufficient heterosexual nature. Nature’s Metropolis reveals present problems with media of abstraction and provides foresight into future problems. In a historical narrative of Chicago, one of the most successful American cities, Cronon traces the roots of 19th-century ecological and economic thought that turned the western frontier into a central metropolis.The author, William Cronon, has a thorough knowledge of his subject and the footnotes and bibliography collect an exhaustive list of sources for every possible angle on the development of Chicago in the nineteenth century. The Chicago River existed, but was short, silted and access to it was blocked by a large sandbar (and, famously, it flowed the other way from what it does now). Even before this, generations of black pioneers in the Old Northwest built farmsteads of their own, as chronicled in Anna-Lisa Cox’s The Bone and Sinew of the Land. Welcome to Commonplace, a destination for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture.

The empirical fact of America’s emergent urban sexual subcultures in the period is beyond dispute, even if this framing relegates them to the “second nature” of social forms freed from a static and ahistorical “familial constraint. If, as Cronon shows in his work, capital moved back and forth between city and country, in African American history, we may well trace a similar exchange of things perhaps less tangible but no less central to the American story: family, striving, and love.While log driving might seem pre-modern or antiquated, once this process was systematized around the 1860s, it greatly increased the speed and efficiency of the movement of forest products and labor.

Joshua Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-To-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Nevertheless, the construction and expansion of America’s railroads out West did more to further Chicago’s growth than perhaps any other factor. A bit less formal than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Commonplace speaks—and listens—to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900.Anna-Lisa Cox, The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018).