For Cronon, the most productive question to ask was not whether or not men forged in the liberty-loving furnace of the Wild West had the sort of impact on America that Turner posited, but the quite different one of how capitalism and political economy had combined to drive the westward expansion of the US. The regeneration of the area into what it is today, for recreation and wood pulp, only took place decades later. This go-round, one word cuts right to the heart of what I most admire about Bill Cronon’s magnum opus: clarity. Cronon’s point is, again, that a sharp division between “urban” and “rural” is a fiction—any city is a dynamic system of constant interplay and exchange between the two, and Chicago is a particularly dramatic exemplar of that principle. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great Westis a nonfiction book published in 1991 by American author and environmental historian William Cronon.

We publish thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide. Much of his focus is on the diminishing costs of transport, but even more is on the fascinating development of standardization in grain grading and the consequent ability to create a liquid market in a truly fungible good.Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and History at Duke University. The logistical improvements described as “the annihilation of space” were coextensive and interwoven with these bodily transformations.

Cronon clearly thinks that while the theory has value, central place theorists make claims of systematization that are inaccurate at best; the real world is a messier place than a mathematical theory allows for. As Americans looked westward for new territory, many viewed mixed-raced Mexicans and their Roman Catholic religion as inferior and incompatible with the Anglo-Saxon Protestant republicanism that was fated to sweep the continent. Likewise, as the lumberjacks cut the pine trees of the north woods, lumber factories developed their networks in the city. From Cronon’s use of spatial theory to the book’s more than two dozen maps and charts, Nature’s Metropolis foreshadowed the rise of spatial history in the decades to come. 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.

As far as meat, this history is better known than Chicago’s history of lumber, perhaps because it lasted much longer, into living memory, if only as a shadow of its former glory. Cronon links the history of the city to its hinterland, and the way they are inextricably the same thing. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1945). 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.

Moving into the information age, labor-time has become more easily and more commonly abstracted, sometimes with troubling results. This is the same history of sexuality John D’Emilio provided in “Capitalism and Gay Identity” and that George Chauncey offers in Gay New York, although one in which sexuality is hustled in through euphemism.For more great content, check out our other projects, ( Just Teach One) and ( Just Teach One African American Print).