Chicago 1890

Chicago 1890
Author: Joanna Merwood-Salisbury
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2009
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Chicago's first skyscrapers are famous for projecting the city's modernity around the world. But what did they mean at home, to the Chicagoans who designed and built them, worked inside their walls, and gazed up at their façades? Answering this multifaceted question, Chicago 1890 reveals that early skyscrapers offered hotly debated solutions to the city's toughest problems and, in the process, fostered an urban culture that spread across the country. An ambitious reinterpretation of the works of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, this volume uses their towering achievements as a lens through which to view late nineteenth-century urban history. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury sheds new light on many of Chicago's defining events--including violent building trade strikes, the Haymarket bombing, the World's Columbian Exposition, and Burnham's Plan of Chicago--by situating the Masonic Temple, the Monadnock Building, and the Reliance Building at the center of the city's cultural and political crosscurrents. While architects and property owners saw these pioneering structures as manifestations of a robust American identity, immigrant laborers and social reformers viewed them as symbols of capitalism's inequity. Illuminated by rich material from the period's popular press and professional journals, Merwood-Salisbury's chronicle of this contentious history reveals that the skyscraper's vaunted status was never as inevitable as today's skylines suggest.

North Shore Chicago

North Shore Chicago
Author: Stuart Earl Cohen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2004
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

The suburban residential area running north above Chicago along

Building the South Side

Building the South Side
Author: Robin F. Bachin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2004-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226033937

Building the South Side explores the struggle for influence that dominated the planning and development of Chicago's South Side during the Progressive Era. Robin F. Bachin examines the early days of the University of Chicago, Chicago’s public parks, Comiskey Park, and the Black Belt to consider how community leaders looked to the physical design of the city to shape its culture and promote civic interaction. Bachin highlights how the creation of a local terrain of civic culture was a contested process, with the battle for cultural authority transforming urban politics and blurring the line between private and public space. In the process, universities, parks and playgrounds, and commercial entertainment districts emerged as alternative arenas of civic engagement. “Bachin incisively charts the development of key urban institutions and landscapes that helped constitute the messy vitality of Chicago’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century public realm.”—Daniel Bluestone, Journal of American History "This is an ambitious book filled with important insights about issues of public space and its use by urban residents. . . . It is thoughtful, very well written, and should be read and appreciated by anyone interested in Chicago or cities generally. It is also a gentle reminder that people are as important as structures and spaces in trying to understand urban development." —Maureen A. Flanagan, American Historical Review

A City Comes of Age

A City Comes of Age
Author: Susan E. Hirsch
Publisher: [Chicago] : Chicago Historical Society
Total Pages: 180
Release: 1990
Genre: History
ISBN:

The exhibition "A City comes of age : Chicago in the 1890s" was held at the Chicago Historical Society from October 24, 1990 to July 14, 1991.

The Cycling City

The Cycling City
Author: Evan Friss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2021-01-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 022675880X

As Evan Friss shows in his mordant history of urban bicycling in the late nineteenth century, the bicycle has long told us much about cities and their residents. In a time when American cities were chaotic, polluted, and socially and culturally impenetrable, the bicycle inspired a vision of an improved city in which pollution was negligible, transport was noiseless and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country blurred. Friss focuses not on the technology of the bicycle but on the urbanisms that bicycling engendered. Bicycles altered the look and feel of cities and their streets, enhanced mobility, fueled leisure and recreation, promoted good health, and shrank urban spaces as part of a larger transformation that altered the city and the lives of its inhabitants, even as the bicycle's own popularity fell, not to rise again for a century. --Publisher's description.

School, Society, and State

School, Society, and State
Author: Tracy L. Steffes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0226772098

This book examines the connections between public school reform in the early twentieth century and American political development from 1890 to 1940.

The Reckless Decade

The Reckless Decade
Author: H.W. Brands
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2002-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226071162

A famous historian demonstrates that one can learn a lot about the contradictions that lie at the heart of America today by looking at them through the lens of the 1890s.

The People's Lobby

The People's Lobby
Author: Elisabeth S. Clemens
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 478
Release: 1997-09-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226109930

Clemens sheds new light on how farmers, workers, and women invented strategies to circumvent the parties. Voters learned to monitor legislative processes, to hold their representatives accountable at the polls, and to institutionalize their ongoing participation in shaping policy. Closely analyzing the organizational politics in three states -- California, Washington, and Wisconsin -- she demonstrates how the political opportunity structure of federalism allowed regional innovations to exert leverage on national political institutions.

Building the South Side

Building the South Side
Author: Robin F. Bachin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2020-05-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022677211X

Building the South Side explores the struggle for influence that dominated the planning and development of Chicago's South Side during the Progressive Era. Robin F. Bachin examines the early days of the University of Chicago, Chicago’s public parks, Comiskey Park, and the Black Belt to consider how community leaders looked to the physical design of the city to shape its culture and promote civic interaction. Bachin highlights how the creation of a local terrain of civic culture was a contested process, with the battle for cultural authority transforming urban politics and blurring the line between private and public space. In the process, universities, parks and playgrounds, and commercial entertainment districts emerged as alternative arenas of civic engagement. “Bachin incisively charts the development of key urban institutions and landscapes that helped constitute the messy vitality of Chicago’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century public realm.”—Daniel Bluestone, Journal of American History "This is an ambitious book filled with important insights about issues of public space and its use by urban residents. . . . It is thoughtful, very well written, and should be read and appreciated by anyone interested in Chicago or cities generally. It is also a gentle reminder that people are as important as structures and spaces in trying to understand urban development." —Maureen A. Flanagan, American Historical Review

A House for All Peoples

A House for All Peoples
Author: John M. Allswang
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2021-10-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0813185750

This book assesses the role of urban ethnic groups, particularly in terms of the rise of the Democratic Party to national predominance between 1928 and 1932. It builds quantitative and qualitative models for the study of ethnic groups in terms of political behavior. Focusing clearly upon political change and the role of ethnicity, the work advances the hypothesis that Chicago's ethnic groups responded as ethnic groups, rather than on socio-economic or other bases, when they shifted their party allegiances in the late twenties. This ethnic realignment was a major factor in the redistribution of power between parties Chicago. Employing a variety of quantitative measures and a number of conceptual tools from the social sciences, Mr. Allswang has utilized simple statistical procedures with clarity and discrimination. His statistical data is based on thorough research in unpublished census material and election returns. His qualitative data is based in part on a comprehensive examination of the foreign language press, supplemented by materials from other newspapers, personal interviews, and manuscript sources. The book studies nine ethnic groups over a generation of political development, affording insights into urban politics and history, and into dominant-minority and interethnic relations in politics and in the city. Crisp in style, thorough, methodologically innovative, A House for All Peoples will become a model for studies of United States political history.