To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He's written some of the most thoughtful, careful, and eloquent pieces I've read, and moreover things with great impact on how I see the world. If a genie appeared and granted me one wish, I would chose to remember every world of every book I deemed worthy of carrying about with me.

The physical worlds emerging from this assemblage—Chicago, most notably—were no less “nature,” but they were nevertheless a “second nature,” a human redirection, if not mastery of “first nature” (xix). Emerging from the theory-driven “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences in the late twentieth century, spatial history now encompasses digital methods such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software and data visualization.Nature’s Metropolis is known to many historians as a classic of environmental history and, as Cameron Blevins will point out here, spatial history. Chicago's rise depended largely on its position as a hub, transit point, and eventually a market for grain, lumber, meat, and other product flows. Spatial history is, broadly speaking, the study of how spatial relations and geographical patterns shape historical processes. Cronon's writing here is also unusually personal, at times - he bookends the history with references to his personal experience growing up in the Chicago hinterland. the idea that the city has a different morality than the country is a key theme of Nature's Metropolis.

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. 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. For example, he explores how the holy trinity of the grain elevator, grade standardization (a pile of wheat became "no.The frame is explicitly economic, and much attention is paid to futures trading and loan debts; docks, stations, and mills. Another focus of the book is the capital flows that promoted and supported the development of Chicago and the west. For Cronon, individualism was scarcely even possible in a capitalist machine in which humans were little more than cogs, and the needs and demands of capital, not capitalists, prevailed. e., the commodities market) works, and a very impressive analysis of, wait for it, 19th century bankruptcy records.

Nature’s Metropolis is a historical analysis of how Chicago, the American West, and areas in between came to rely on one another for economic and ecological prominence.It seems so obvious when stated that way, but Cronon finds himself debunking ignorant anti-capitalist myths even during the 1800s (not to say he's pro-capitalist, necessarily. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America’s most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. The reader of Nature’s Metropolis, however, would be quick to wonder what might happen when student-investments are transformed from curious undergraduates into abstractions that can be traded on four-year future markets, or even bundled into investment vehicles.