Trains, telegraphs, and telephones allowed payment to be transferred to a logger in the woods of Wisconsin from a bank in Chicago, once proof of work was sent to the bank. Fox, A History of the Lumber Industry in the State of New York, USDA, Bureau of Forestry Bulletin no.

In this section on capital, Cronon also examines the spread of the capital-intensive market for farm machinery, which relied heavily on the development of efficient credit markets. Throughout the book, he takes his readers by the hand and tells them stories that reveal the marvels of such seemingly banal topics as railroad rate-setting, commodities markets, and capital flows. This is an important, fascinating history of Chicago and the west, of its businesses and industries, its ecologies and environments. For each topic, he focuses both narrowly on how each developed and changed over time, and more broadly on how each affected the city and the larger Great West. The sanitized syntax of “intensivity” conceals the technologies, not to mention visceral interspecies interactions, necessary for all this mating to be made.We have partnered with many of the most influential societies and academic bodies to publish their journals and book series.

From a historic, economic, and cultural perspective there are few books that will show you so much about the world at large while explaining one central point in beautiful, illuminating detail. Even less are they opposed to each other, whatever city slickers or the Grangers may think—they instead need each other, often in ways that are totally invisible to both. The capitalist transformation of the American West described in Nature’s Metropolis was propelled by an intensive deployment of these technologies to produce and multiply new forms of life at ever greater rates, and we must see this relationship between capital and non-human reproduction as key to the functioning of industrial capitalism in the period. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).

Famous people are not the focus; culture and politics are only addressed in passing and where actually relevant; and, fortunately, ideology and political correctness make no appearance at all. Writing around the height of the “literary” or “cultural” turn in historical studies—a time when many historians were aping the prolix, jargon-ridden mannerisms of postmodern and post-structuralist theorists—Bill self-consciously chose to advance a more inclusive historical vision. In a similar vein, the new suburbs were designed to offer a polished, sanitized version of the nature whose modification and production made the city possible. If, as Cronon shows in his work, capital moved back and forth between city and country, in African American history, we may well trace a similar exchange of things perhaps less tangible but no less central to the American story: family, striving, and love. e., the commodities market) works, and a very impressive analysis of, wait for it, 19th century bankruptcy records.

Cronon navigates a path between the followers of Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the thesis that American character was shaped by the experience of the frontier, and revisionists who sought to suggest that the rugged individualism Turner depicted as a creation of life in the West was little but a fiction. The argument made by free market and growth-oriented climate change contrarians that the activities of little old Man could never have such a strong impact on "nature" starts to look very pallid indeed. The same process created the rural tourism industry and the outdoor recreation movement – a process Greg Summers discusses in much more detail in Consuming Nature. Louis on moving sack loads of grain from ships to warehouses through “the labor of probably two or three hundred Irishmen, negroes and mules” (112).

In short, the redaction of animal reproduction in Nature’s Metropolis—its organization and regimentation—is the process by which animal sex is re-natured and narratively ascribed to a self-sufficient heterosexual nature. For example, the mouth of the Chicago River was too shallow and the currents from Lake Michigan too strong for ships to navigate close to the city.

Rebecca Woods, T he Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Without boosters, Chicago would not necessarily have grown as it did, or ultimately occupied the position it does. Joshua Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-To-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).Feel like I gained an understanding of the context of the Chicago-Detroit-Northern MI-WI landscapes and the history of my own family. This, together with mass centralized storage through the new technology of grain elevators, which allowed vastly lower holding costs, meant that fungible grain was traded easily and quickly, rather than trade necessitating the use of sacks of grain identified to a specific farmer until their final sale to the end user. This is an odd assumption, I would contend, because both the book and historians of sexuality are preoccupied with how capitalist modernity has formed American cityscapes.