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.

Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago

Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago
Author: Dominic A. Pacyga
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2003-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226644240

Chronicles the experiences of immigrants in two iconic South Side Polish neighborhoods in Chicago to demonstrate how Poles created new communities in an attempt to preserve the customs of their homeland.

Exit Zero

Exit Zero
Author: Christine J. Walley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2013-01-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226871819

Winner of CLR James Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association and 2nd Place for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. In 1980, Christine J. Walley’s world was turned upside down when the steel mill in Southeast Chicago where her father worked abruptly closed. In the ensuing years, ninety thousand other area residents would also lose their jobs in the mills—just one example of the vast scale of deindustrialization occurring across the United States. The disruption of this event propelled Walley into a career as a cultural anthropologist, and now, in Exit Zero, she brings her anthropological perspective home, examining the fate of her family and that of blue-collar America at large. Interweaving personal narratives and family photos with a nuanced assessment of the social impacts of deindustrialization, Exit Zero is one part memoir and one part ethnography— providing a much-needed female and familial perspective on cultures of labor and their decline. Through vivid accounts of her family’s struggles and her own upward mobility, Walley reveals the social landscapes of America’s industrial fallout, navigating complex tensions among class, labor, economy, and environment. Unsatisfied with the notion that her family’s turmoil was inevitable in the ever-forward progress of the United States, she provides a fresh and important counternarrative that gives a new voice to the many Americans whose distress resulting from deindustrialization has too often been ignored. This book is part of a project that also includes a documentary film.

Making a New Deal

Making a New Deal
Author: Lizabeth Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2014-11-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107431794

Examines how ordinary factory workers became unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s.

Garbage Wars

Garbage Wars
Author: David Naguib Pellow
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2004-09-17
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 026266187X

A study of the struggle for environmental justice, focusing on conflicts over solid waste and pollution in Chicago. In Garbage Wars, the sociologist David Pellow describes the politics of garbage in Chicago. He shows how garbage affects residents in vulnerable communities and poses health risks to those who dispose of it. He follows the trash, the pollution, the hazards, and the people who encountered them in the period 1880-2000. What unfolds is a tug of war among social movements, government, and industry over how we manage our waste, who benefits, and who pays the costs. Studies demonstrate that minority and low-income communities bear a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards. Pellow analyzes how and why environmental inequalities are created. He also explains how class and racial politics have influenced the waste industry throughout the history of Chicago and the United States. After examining the roles of social movements and workers in defining, resisting, and shaping garbage disposal in the United States, he concludes that some environmental groups and people of color have actually contributed to environmental inequality. By highlighting conflicts over waste dumping, incineration, landfills, and recycling, Pellow provides a historical view of the garbage industry throughout the life cycle of waste. Although his focus is on Chicago, he places the trends and conflicts in a broader context, describing how communities throughout the United States have resisted the waste industry's efforts to locate hazardous facilities in their backyards. The book closes with suggestions for how communities can work more effectively for environmental justice and safe, sustainable waste management.

Urban Green

Urban Green
Author: Colin Fisher
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2015-05-11
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1469619962

In early twentieth-century America, affluent city-dwellers made a habit of venturing out of doors and vacationing in resorts and national parks. Yet the rich and the privileged were not the only ones who sought respite in nature. In this pathbreaking book, historian Colin Fisher demonstrates that working-class white immigrants and African Americans in rapidly industrializing Chicago also fled the urban environment during their scarce leisure time. If they had the means, they traveled to wilderness parks just past the city limits as well as to rural resorts in Wisconsin and Michigan. But lacking time and money, they most often sought out nature within the city itself--at urban parks and commercial groves, along the Lake Michigan shore, even in vacant lots. Chicagoans enjoyed a variety of outdoor recreational activities in these green spaces, and they used them to forge ethnic and working-class community. While narrating a crucial era in the history of Chicago's urban development, Fisher makes important interventions in debates about working-class leisure, the history of urban parks, environmental justice, the African American experience, immigration history, and the cultural history of nature.

Chicago's Industrial Decline

Chicago's Industrial Decline
Author: Robert Lewis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501752634

In Chicago's Industrial Decline Robert Lewis charts the city's decline since the 1920s and describes the early development of Chicago's famed (and reviled) growth machine. Beginning in the 1940s and led by local politicians, downtown business interest, financial institutions, and real estate groups, place-dependent organizations in Chicago implemented several industrial renewal initiatives with the dual purpose of stopping factory closings and attracting new firms in order to turn blighted property into modern industrial sites. At the same time, a more powerful coalition sought to adapt the urban fabric to appeal to middle-class consumption and residential living. As Lewis shows, the two aims were never well integrated, and the result was on-going disinvestment and the inexorable decline of Chicago's industrial space. By the 1950s, Lewis argues, it was evident that the early incarnation of the growth machine had failed to maintain Chicago's economic center in industry. Although larger economic and social forces—specifically, competition for business and for residential development from the suburbs in the Chicagoland region and across the whole United States—played a role in the city's industrial decline, Lewis stresses the deep incoherence of post-WWII economic policy and urban planning that hoped to square the circle by supporting both heavy industry and middle- to upper-class amenities in downtown Chicago.

Industrial Cities

Industrial Cities
Author: Clemens Zimmermann
Publisher: Campus Verlag
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2013-09-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3593421143

Ob Birmingham, Rotterdam oder Wolfsburg: Industriestädte haben nicht nur völlig unterschiedliche Gesichter, sie unterliegen auch einem bemerkenswerten zeitlichen Wandel. Die Autoren behandeln die Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft der Industriestadt als europäisches Phänomen. Aus soziologischer, historischer, geografischer und medialer Perspektive erörtern sie unterschiedliche historische Modelle und Typen von Industriestädten im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, diskutieren die Frage nach der Zukunft von monostrukturellen Industriestädten sowie mediale Repräsentationsformen industrialisierter Städte. Mit Beiträgen vonChristoph Bernhardt, Hans-Peter Dörrenbächer, Simon Gunn, Christine Hannemann, Martina Heßler, Martin Jemelka, Henry Keazor, Robert Lewis, Timo Luks, Rebecca Magdin, Jörg Plöger, Richard Rodger, Rolf Sachsse, Adelheid von Saldern, Ondrej Sevecek, Judith Thissen und Clemens Zimmermann.

Calvinists Incorporated

Calvinists Incorporated
Author: Anne Kelly Knowles
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1997-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226448533

Bringing immigrants onstage as central players in the drama of rural capitalist transformation, Anne Kelly Knowles traces a community of Welsh immigrants to Jackson and Gallia counties in southern Ohio. After reconstructing the gradual process of community-building, Knowles focuses on the pivotal moment when the immigrants became involved with the industrialization of their new region as workers and investors in Welsh-owned charcoal iron companies. Setting the southern Ohio Welsh in the context of Welsh immigration as a whole from 1795 to 1850, Knowles explores how these strict Calvinists responded to the moral dilemmas posed by leaving their native land and experiencing economic success in the United States. Knowles draws on a wide variety of sources, including obituaries and community histories, to reconstruct the personal histories of over 1,700 immigrants. The resulting account will find appreciative readers not only among historical geographers, but also among American economic historians and historians of religion.

Chicago

Chicago
Author: John F. McDonald
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2015-08-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317418816

Chicago went from nothing in 1830 to become the second-largest city in the nation in 1900, while the Midwest developed to become one of the world’s foremost urban areas. This book is an economic history of the Chicago metropolitan area from the 1820s to the present. It examines the city in its Midwestern region and compares it to the other major cities of the North. This book uses theories of the economics of location and other economic models to explain much of Chicago’s history. Chicago maintained its status as the second-largest city through the first decades of the 20th century, but rapid growth shifted to the Sunbelt following World War II. Since the 1950s the city’s history can be divided into four distinct periods; growth with suburbanization (1950-1970), absence of growth, continued suburbanization, and central city crisis (1970-1990), rebound in the 1990s, and financial crisis and deep recession after 2000. Through it all Chicago has maintained its position as the economic capital of the Midwest. The book is a synthesis of available literature and public data, and stands as an example of using economics to understand much of the history of Chicago. This book is intended for the college classroom, urban scholars, and for those interested in the history of one of world’s foremost urban areas.