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City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. By Donald L. Miller. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 704 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-684-80194-9.)
Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874. By Karen Sawislak. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. xii, 396 pp. Cloth, $42.50, ISBN 0-226-73547-8. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-226-73548-6.)
From William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1991) to Harold L. Platt's The Electric City (1991) to Robin Einhorn's Property Rules (1991), a number of scholars have recently examined the history of nineteenth-century Chicago. What these disparate studies share is a belief that Chicago is more typically American than other big cities and that its history can illuminate the processes of industrial capitalism. Although much different in form, Donald L. Miller's City of the Century and Karen Sawislak's Smoldering City both belong to this tradition of understanding Chicago in national terms.
Miller revives one of the oldest urban history forms, the city biography. Although useful for tracing a particular city's long-term development, the city biography has been disdained for being celebratory and uncritical and for concentrating on elites. Miller's study of Chicago from its settlement in 1818 to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 corrects these flaws and shows that city biography is a more valuable form than urban historians have appreciated. Its framework incorporates poor residents, and it views Chicago's history as conflict-ridden. As Chicago grew and power relations formed, struggles erupted over economic development, privatism, and social equality. Miller investigates these struggles chiefly through profiles of key participants and institutions. He also puts Chicago in regional and national context. He contends that Chicago was the first modern city, the place where Americans first encountered industrial capitalism.
From the beginning, Chicago had superb transportation advantages. Chicago was established by fur traders in 1818, astride the...