A Natural History of the Chicago Region

A Natural History of the Chicago Region
Author: Joel Greenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 614
Release: 2002
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0226306496

"In A Natural History of the Chicago Region, Greenberg takes you on a journey that begins with European explorers and settlers and hasn't ended yet. Along the way he introduces you to the physical forces that have shaped the area from southeastern Wisconsin to northern Indiana and Berrien County in Michigan; the various habitat types present in the region and how European settlement has affected them; and the insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, and mammals found in presettlement times, then amid the settlers and now amid the skyscrappers. In all, Greenberg chronicles the development of nineteen counties in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin across centuries of ecological, technological, and social transformations."--BOOK JACKET.

Chicago History for Kids

Chicago History for Kids
Author: Owen Hurd
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2007-07-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1613740409

From the Native Americans who lived in the Chicago area for thousands of years, to the first European explorers Marquette and Jolliet, to the 2005 Chicago White Sox World Series win, parents, teachers, and kids will love this comprehensive and exciting history of how Chicago became the third largest city in the U.S. Chicago's spectacular and impressive history comes alive through activities such as building a model of the original Ferris Wheel, taking architectural walking tours of the first skyscrapers and Chicago's oldest landmarks, and making a Chicago-style hotdog. Serving as both a guide to kids and their parents and an engaging tool for teachers, this book details the first Chicagoan Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Fort Dearborn Massacre, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the building of the world's first skyscraper, and the hosting of two World's Fairs. In addition to uncovering Windy City treasures such as the birth of the vibrant jazz era of Louis Armstrong and the work of Chicago poets, novelists, and songwriters, kids will also learn about Chicago's triumphant and tortured sports history.

Chicago Gardens

Chicago Gardens
Author: Cathy Jean Maloney
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2008-09-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226502368

Once maligned as a swampy outpost, the fledgling city of Chicago brazenly adopted the motto Urbs in Horto or City in a Garden, in 1837. Chicago Gardens shows how this upstart town earned its sobriquet over the next century, from the first vegetable plots at Fort Dearborn to innovative garden designs at the 1933 World’s Fair. Cathy Jean Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and here she reveals the unusual history of Chicago’s first gardens. Challenged by the region’s clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Chicago’s pioneering horticulturalists, Maloney demonstrates, found imaginative uses for hardy prairie plants. This same creative spirit thrived in the city’s local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nation’s produce hub. The vast plains that surrounded Chicago, meanwhile, inspired early landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and O.C. Simonds, to new heights of grandeur. Maloney does not forget the backyard gardeners: immigrants who cultivated treasured seeds and pioneers who planted native wildflowers. Maloney’s vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like “Bouquet Mary,” a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argument–that Chicago’s garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation. With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide descriptions of living legacy gardens for today’s visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world.

City of Big Shoulders

City of Big Shoulders
Author: Robert G. Spinney
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501748351

"Condensed yet energetic and substantial history of Chicago. Spinney has a firm sense of historical narrative as well as a keen eye for entertaining and illuminating detail."― Publishers Weekly 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. 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?

Early Chicago

Early Chicago
Author: Ulrich Danckers
Publisher: Early Chicago Incorporated
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2000
Genre: Chicago (Ill.)
ISBN: 9780967582306

Chicago Made

Chicago Made
Author: Robert Lewis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2009-05-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226477045

From the lumberyards and meatpacking factories of the Southwest Side to the industrial suburbs that arose near Lake Calumet at the turn of the twentieth century, manufacturing districts shaped Chicago’s character and laid the groundwork for its transformation into a sprawling metropolis. Approaching Chicago’s story as a reflection of America’s industrial history between the Civil War and World War II, Chicago Made explores not only the well-documented workings of centrally located city factories but also the overlooked suburbanization of manufacturing and its profound effect on the metropolitan landscape. Robert Lewis documents how manufacturers, attracted to greenfield sites on the city’s outskirts, began to build factory districts there with the help of an intricate network of railroad owners, real estate developers, financiers, and wholesalers. These immense networks of social ties, organizational memberships, and financial relationships were ultimately more consequential, Lewis demonstrates, than any individual achievement. Beyond simply giving Chicago businesses competitive advantages, they transformed the economic geography of the region. Tracing these transformations across seventy-five years, Chicago Made establishes a broad new foundation for our understanding of urban industrial America.

Historic Chicago Bakeries

Historic Chicago Bakeries
Author: Jennifer Billock
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2021-09-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1467150118

As immigrants came from outside the United States and settled in pockets around Chicago, each neighborhood had its own bakery--and sometimes several. At one time, more than seven thousand bakeries dotted the city streets. Stalwarts like Dinkel's, Roeser's, Weber's, Pticek and Ferrara continue a legacy that shaped Chicago's food traditions: an atomic cake for family celebrations, bacon buns in the morning or a poppy seed bun for hot dogs and pączki and zeppole for holidays. Even the never-ending debate over seeded or unseeded rye. From pioneering bakers to today's cake makers, author Jennifer Billock puts the sweet and doughy history of Chicago on display.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago

The Encyclopedia of Chicago
Author: James R. Grossman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1117
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226310152

A comprehensive historical reference on metropolitan Chicago encompasses more than 1,400 entries on such topics as neighborhoods, ethnic groups, cultural institutions, and business history, and furnishes interpretive essays on the literary images of Chicago, the built environment, and the city's sports culture.

Rising Up from Indian Country

Rising Up from Indian Country
Author: Ann Durkin Keating
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2012-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226428982

“Sets the record straight about the War of 1812’s Battle of Fort Dearborn and its significance to early Chicago’s evolution . . . informative, ambitious” (Publishers Weekly). In August 1812, Capt. Nathan Heald began the evacuation of ninety-four people from the isolated outpost of Fort Dearborn. After traveling only a mile and a half, they were attacked by five hundred Potawatomi warriors, who killed fifty-two members of Heald’s party and burned Fort Dearborn before returning to their villages. In the first book devoted entirely to this crucial period, noted historian Ann Durkin Keating richly recounts the Battle of Fort Dearborn while situating it within the nearly four decades between the 1795 Treaty of Greenville and the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. She tells a story not only of military conquest but of the lives of people on all sides of the conflict, highlighting such figures as Jean Baptiste Point de Sable and John Kinzie and demonstrating that early Chicago was a place of cross-cultural reliance among the French, the Americans, and the Native Americans. This gripping account of the birth of Chicago “opens up a fascinating vista of lost American history” and will become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the city and its complex origins (The Wall Street Journal). “Laid out with great insight and detail . . . Keating . . . doesn’t see the attack 200 years ago as a massacre. And neither do many historians and Native American leaders.” —Chicago Tribune “Adds depth and breadth to an understanding of the geographic, social, and political transitions that occurred on the shores of Lake Michigan in the early 1800s.” —Journal of American History

The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Author: John W. Boyer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 785
Release: 2024-09-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0226835316

An expanded narrative of the rich, unique history of the University of Chicago. One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than one hundred and fifty countries, its impact is far-reaching and long-lasting. With The University of Chicago: A History, John W. Boyer, Dean of the College from 1992 to 2023, thoroughly engages with the history and the lived politics of the university. Boyer presents a history of a complex academic community, focusing on the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the resources and conditions that have enabled the university to sustain itself through decades of change. He has mined the archives, exploring the school’s complex and sometimes controversial past to set myth and hearsay apart from fact. Boyer’s extensive research shows that the University of Chicago’s identity is profoundly interwoven with its history, and that history is unique in the annals of American higher education. After a little-known false start in the mid-nineteenth century, it achieved remarkable early successes, yet in the 1950s it faced a collapse of undergraduate enrollment, which proved fiscally debilitating for decades. Throughout, the university retained its fierce commitment to a distinctive, intense academic culture marked by intellectual merit and free debate, allowing it to rise to international acclaim. Today it maintains a strong obligation to serve the larger community through its connections to alumni, to the city of Chicago, and increasingly to its global community. Boyer’s tale is filled with larger-than-life characters—John D. Rockefeller, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and many other famous figures among them—and episodes that reveal the establishment and rise of today’s institution. Newly updated, this edition extends through the presidency of Robert Zimmer, whose long tenure was marked by significant developments and controversies over subjects as varied as free speech, medical inequity, and community relations.