| | Nature's
Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West,
by William Cronon.
For many people history is still
seen as a presentation of facts that tell people "this
is the way it was." But for historians, and their readers,
it is much more complex, less objective and more subjective.
Today the historian is something of an editor, presenting
only a portion of a multitude of facts on a particular subject
to generate different ways of looking at our past. Perhaps
the best example of this multitude of voices is Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United
States. Another, more narrowly-focused but no less
grand, addition to this "genre" is William Cronon's
history of 19th-century Chicago and its environs, Nature's
Metropolis.
Immediately, the title hints at the
book's angle: the interdependence of city and country. Many
histories separate the city from the country, but Cronon
acknowledges that one cannot exist without the other. Chicago
would not be the city it is today without the small towns
and miles and miles of farmland to its west. Equally, these
places could not exist without a metropolis available for
the selling and distribution of crops, meat, and lumber.
And its these three pieces that tell the story of 19th-century
Chicago, not the politicians nor the architects nor other
people who sit behind the businessmen in shaping the evolution
of the city and its hinterlands and laying the foundation
for Capitalism's global rise.
Throughout the book, Cronon uses
the phrase "second nature" to help describe both
the physical and abstract/economic modifications of the
land's "first nature". This second nature illustrates
that we have changed most of the American landscape for
our ends so much in the last few hundred years to render
the first nature but a distant history or memory. As sad
a fact as that may be, the idea of second nature also indicates
that our paths are not predetermined and ecologic destruction
for economic ends is not the only means. Like many other
histories, this book looks at the past, but it also looks
to the future, creating a well-researched body of knowledge
and a unique viewpoint that can affect the way we look at
the relationship between city and country and perhaps affect
the way decisions are made in the future.
. . or . . 
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