City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America by Donald L. Miller

City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America Reviews

• 
  Peter

  A sprawling, comprehensive history of Chicago in the 19th Century, when the city rose from a swampy trading post to one of the greatest industrial metropolises of the world. My only reservation is that I’ve already read about many of Miller’s major subjects (Pullman, the stockyards, the 1893 World’s Fair, Jane Addams) in book-length studies elsewhere, so much of this wasn’t new to me. Still, his sections on early French exploration, the first white settlers, architecture and journalists were quite interesting to me.
• 
  Rosalinda

  I gained much knowledge about my hometown by reading this. I knew the general history but not all of the details. The recent shutdown of a political candidate's visit made me proud of my city & as I am miles away from visiting there at the present moment, needed a reminder of all I love about the Windy City. This was sufficient....for now. ;)
• 
  Maggie Needham

  Here are some things I learned from this book:
  - They have to literally lift up all the buildings one time to put in a sewage system and everyone went out to watch the buildings rise like a foot off the ground????
  - Saloons used to have free lunches!!!!
  - The population grew so quickly I can't imagine living somewhere the changed so much over the course of a lifetime.
  - Frank Lloyd Wright said that "The Art Institute is a stupid building."
  - Ida B. Wells is rad af I need to read more about her.
• 
  Logan Crossley

  19th century Chicago grew from the seed of a town to a heaving colossus by the lake. This book documents that magnificent rise and the people whose hard work, blind luck, and limitless ambition made it so.
  
  Walking around Chicago today, after reading City of the Century, one can feel the background radiation of that early energy still rippling through the bustle. Trips to the museum campus and to the site of the old Haymarket Square are made in the company of ghosts.
  
  I appreciated Miller’s narrative style (very McCulloughesque) and his eye for poetic detail. I’d recommend this book for anyone who: 1) lives in or likes Chicago, 2) is fascinated by the gulf between the Civil War and Teddy Roosevelt that American civic memory seems to mostly ignore, or 3) wants a primer on the American tropes of Farmer and Industrial Worker that became the bedrock of the cultural myth that predated and defined 20th century modernism in the US (see: the work of Grant Wood, The Art Deco movement, and the wall art inside Baker Brothers chain restaurants).
• 
  Brad

  Dense and exhaustive. Occasionally I'd zone out, though, which made reading this tome take a while. Essential for Chicagoans interested in local history.
  
  
  Notes:
  Oct 8, 1871 around 9 o’clock, a one-and-a-half day fire leaving 90,000 (of 300,000) homeless and nearly 300 dead. (15)
  
  “within a week after the fire more than five thousand temporary structures had been created and two hundred permanent buildings were under construction.” (16)
  
  Frech-Canadien fur traders and explorers like Joliet and Jesuit missionaries (like Marquette) to explore. (27)
  
  calumet – sacred smoking pipes elaborately decorated and a sign of peace (33)
  
  Fort Dearborn was erected after the Revolutionary War by the federal government in 1803. (47)
  
  Chicago transitioned from a fur-trading outpost to a capitalist town (51)
  
  Kinzie Sr. had been a fur trader (52)
  
  Jean Baptiste du Sable was “a cultivated mulatto fur trader from Santo Domingo” (55)
  
  John Kinzie might have been Chicago’s first white resident, but Point du Sable has the strongest claim to being its first permanent non-Indian settler…‘the First Chicagoan’ was a proud and prosperous black man who lived at the head of the river for almost twenty years in a house that his white-skinned pretender was too impoverished in his old age to hold on to.” (56)
  
  “The center of early Chicago was not the place where John Kinzie’s homestead faced the lime-slaked walls of the fort. It was just upriver at Wolf Point, the rollicking gathering place of a racially mixed settlement of Indians, half-breeds, French Canadians, and Anglo-Americans…its inhabitants were bound together into a community by three things: isolation from civilized society, trade in furs, and drinking and reveling at the river taverns on Wolf Point.” (56)
  
  “it was the canal project—the dream of Joliet—that made Chicago a town.” (58)
  
  Fur trader Hubbard had a trail that became a state road in 1834. “Its Chicago terminus, State Street” (58)
  
  “Land sales were slow at first, and not nearly enough money was raised to begin canal construction. But the canal seemed a certainty now, and that drew the attention of land speculators back East.” But first ‘the Indian threat’ had to be removed. (60)
  
  “Every steamer and two-masted schooner arriving in Chicago carried agents of eastern capitalists. One of them was a young country lawyer from western New York named William Butler Ogden, whose sister had recently married Charles Butler, a marriage that dramatically changed Ogden’s fortunes—and Chicago’s as well.” (70)
  
  “if Gurdon Hubbard is partly responsible for locating present-day Chicago where it is, the one most responsible for turning it into a flourishing city was his lawyer and sometime business associate, William Butler Ogden, ‘Chicago’s Founder.’” (73)
  
  Ogden becomes mayor (74)
  
  “Modern Chicago was born in 1848.” (89)
  
  “Everything was covered with mud after soaking spring rains, and there were no paved streets or sidewalks and no sewers. Nor was there any drainage.” (90)
  
  “By the opening of the Civil War, more railroads met at Chicago than at any other spot on the globe, making it the ‘Big Junction,’ or linkage point, of the national economy.” (91)
  
  McCormick’s wealth came from a reaper invention.
  
  “This enormous increase in grain—from under 2 million bushels in 1850 to over 50 million bushels in 1861—created a radical need for more warehouses and for a quicker method of storing and selling it.” (108)
  
  “Situated on the edge of two different ecosystems, the timber-rich forests of northern Wisconsin and Michigan and the woodless prairies, and built on the water corridor that connected them, Chicago became the leading lumber market of the world by the mid-1850s.” (111)
  
  In [1864], Chicago replaced Cincinnati as Porkopolis, the capital of western meatpacking.” (114)
  
  “In 1868, Hutchison was the first packer to move from Bridgeport to a cleared and drained bog next t the new Union Stock Yards in the town of Lake, four miles southwest of Chicago’s city center.” (116)
  
  “In 1854 cholera hit the expanding city with devastating force, taking nearly 6 percent of the population.” (122)
  
  “Construction of the new sewers and streets forced the city council to raise the grade of the city by as much as ten feet in places.” (125)
  
  “The ‘river regeneration’ [reversing the river] was completed on July 18, 1871.” (130)
  
  “With a five-thousand-dollar gift from his father and some original ideas about merchandising, Palmer had opened a dry-goods store that transformed the city’s retail trade. He was the first city merchant to cater expressly to women, especially wealthy women [who were unescorted, even]…He displayed these items in the big, brightly decorated show windows of the new Lake Street store he opened in 1858, the largest dry-goods establishment in the West; and he was the first city storekeeper to advertise extensively in newspapers and to run ‘sales’ or ‘bargain days.’” (139)
  
  “Palmer, like Cyrus McCormick, guaranteed customers a full cash refund, ‘without question or quibble,’ if their purchases ‘proved unsatisfactory either in price, quality or style’…Palmer also introduced the practice of delivering goods to the homes of customers free of charge” (140)
  
  Next came Palmer House, the 8-story, 225 room hotel o State Street. (141)
  
  “Chicago’s fire department recommended repeatedly that a building-inspection department be established, that metal roofs be required for hotels and other large buildings, and the city install more fire hydrants, build larger water mains, hire more firemen, and purchase two fireboats with powerful pumps to patrol the river, which was crossed by wooden bridges, filled with wooden shipping, and lined with combustibles—grain elevators, lumberyards, woodworking factories, long trains of wooden rail cars, and mountains of coal for industrial and household use. But the city government rejected every one of these recommendations, insisting that higher taxes and stricter building codes would have a discouraging effect on business expansion.” (144)
  
  “It was one of the great catastrophes of modern times. Property worth $190 million was destroyed—seventy-five miles of streets and 17,450 buildings—and almost 100,000 persons were left homeless.” (159)
  
  “In ‘the City of Speed,’ cable cars traveled at more than nine miles an hour in heavy traffic, three miles an hour faster than New York’s horsecars, still the main means of public transportation in that city in the late 1880s.” (185)
  
  Pullman, Armour, Union Stockyards
  
  “here on the lakeshore of South Chicago was the second-largest steel complex in America, the Pittsburgh of the prairie.” (241)
  
  “Using steel rails to reach country kitchens with shopping catalos that revolutionized the buying habits of millions of Americans, Aaron Montgomery Ward made Chicago the mail-order capital of the world.” (244)
  
  “In 1870, Ward quit his job and returned to Chicago to start a business that would buy merchandise in volume, for cash, and sell it by mail, for cash, to the disgruntled customers of the country stores.” (245)
  
  “By 1893, Montgomery Ward and Company was receiving over fifteen thousand orders a day through the mail, and its catalog of more than five hundred pages reached over a quarter of a million people, making the company one of the biggest merchandising organizations in the world. Beginning in that year, however, it was no longer the only general mail-order business in America. Just after the closing of the World’s Fair, the Minneapolis firm of Sear, Roebuck and Company, incorporated that year, opened a trial branch office in Chicago. The war of the catalogs was on.” (247)
  
  “With the completion of the seven-story Marshall Field Wholesale Store in 1887, one year after Richardson’s death at the age of forty-seven, ‘modern commercial architecture was born.’” (252)
  
  “The [Marshall] Field customer was served, not negotiated with, and was encouraged to browse and dream without pressure to buy. Aside from Field himself, the person most responsible for maintaining this atmosphere was Harry Gordon Selfridge, a former company stock boy who was made head of retail in the 1880s and who moved to London after Field’s death to found the English house of Selfridge & Co.” (261)
  
  “at night Selfridge lit up the entire store—inside and out—with electric lamps and bulbs, giving it a festival-like atmosphere. Marshall Field’s was the first of Chicago’s big stores to make use of the magic of electricity” (261)
  
  “On a chilly April evening in 1878, a crowd gathered around W.W. Boyington’s castellated Water Tower, the city’s proudest monument, to watch a ‘long talked of experiment, by John P. Barrett, a city engineer. When the gas lamps in the square were shut off, the hushed crowd saw a flickering but brilliant light at the top of the tower, more light than was produced by over six hundred of the city’s gas street lamps. That night, Chicago entered the age of electricity.” (261)
  
  “One year after Barrett’s demonstration, Thomas Alva Edison invented the incandescent bulb. The arc light produced too much light and heat for small interior spaces, and it was a fire hazard…Before Edison, light and fire were synonymous, and all illumination was based on burning hydrocarbons in the open air. With Edison’s enclosed lamp—cut off from the very oxygen that fed fire and producing none of the smoke that had always been the by-product of light—‘fire and light would never again be identical.’ Whereas Edison’s lamps burned for hundreds of hours, the filaments of arc lamps lasted only eight or nine hours” (262)
  
  “On a January morning in 1882, a train of ten small cars packed with city dignitaries and decked out with flags and streamers made its way down State Street from Marshall Field’s store to Twenty-first Street, four miles south, the end of the first stretch of tracks of Chicago’s first cable-car system…And by the time of the Columbian Exposition, Chicago, the farthest-spreading city in America, had the largest cable-car system in the world tying it together, with eighty-six miles of track, eleven power plants, and over fifteen hundred cars.” (265)
  
  “New York was the birthplace of the skyscraper, but the most brilliant achievements of the early high-rise construction and design occurred in Chicago.” (302)
  
  “William Le Baron Jenney was the only classically trained architect-engineer in Chicago when he arrived there after outstanding service in the Civil War. The mentor of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, and Martin Roche” (335)
  
  Daniel Burnham wanted to “transform a lakefront still cluttered with train tracks, squatters’ shacks, and mountains of garbage into a forum of parks, public statuary, and stately civic architecture. Burnham’s Chicago Plan of 1909, the greatest municipal project in Chicago’s history, would take its inspiration directly from the dream city he had built in Olmsted’s lakeside park.” (385)
  
  “The University of Chicago was perhaps the only institution of higher learning in history to begin its life with a world-renowned faculty.” (401)
  
  “From its beginnings, the Upward Movement was riven by disagreements reflected in the competing character and aims of the University of Chicago and the Art Institute, on the one hand, and the Newberry Library and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, on the other.” (404)
  
  “Hull-House was not the first settlement house in America. Unknown to Addams, one was established in New York City in 1886 and soon hundreds of others would be founded, sixty-seven in Chicago alone by World War I. But Hull-House was easily the most famous, due largely to ‘Saint Jane,’ as the Chicago press began to call Addams, by 1900 the best-known woman in the world, after Queen Victoria.” (422)
  
  “Chicago River was permanently reversed, making it the first river in the world to flow away from its mouth…the Tribune declared, ‘it was one of the most important events in the history of Chicago,’ the beginning of the ‘pure water era.’ St. Louis still took Chicago to court, but the case was eventually dismissed when a report by scientists concluded that the canal’s dilution process worked: the Chicago River’s wastewater was clean by the time / it reached Joliet.” (428-429)
  
  Haymarket
  
  “The [Columbian Exposition] fair drew an estimated 27 million people, 14 million from outside the United States, making it the greatest tourist attraction in American history.” (488)
  
  “Most fairgoers went out to Jackson Park by cable car, by Charles Yerkes’s new fast-flying ‘El’ train, or in one of the Illinois Central’s open ‘cattle cars,’ which made the trip from the Loop to the fairgrounds in twelve minutes. But all guidebooks agreed that the most delightful way to go was by lake steamer. The World’s Fair Steamship Company ran a fleet of twenty-five steamers from its midtown dock, and for a fifteen-cent fare, passengers were treated to band music and a ‘continuous panoramic picture [of] the best built and busiest city in the world.” (490)
  
  Pullman strike
  
  Eugene Debs
  
  “Daniel Burnham began conceiving plans for a series of civic improvements that would transform Jackson Park and the downtown lakeshore that Gurdon Hubbard has helped save for the city into a spectacular public pleasure ground, the landscape centerpiece of his Chicago Plan of 1909, the greatest civic project to come out of the fair.” (550)
  
• 
  Tim Martin

  This was an epic history of Chicago and indeed much of 19th century America, as true to the title, much of what happened in Chicago had lasting impacts on the rest of the United States in the 19th, 20th, and even arguably the 21st centuries. The book can be read several ways, the author succeeding in my mind in each of these ways; it can be read as a history of Chicago from its founding to the end of the 19th century, with most of the emphasis on the 19th century. It can be read as a history of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, marking the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage in 1492, the book covering events leading up to the fair, what the fair was like, and events and society immediately after (the book covers a great deal more than that, but the Columbian Exposition, particularly events leading up to it, gets a lot of coverage). It can be a read as a gripping account of the Great Chicago Fire (which occurred October 8 through 10, 1871), of what conditions existed to allow such a horrible fire to occur, what it was like to experience the fire, and how the fire changed Chicago and indeed in many ways the country. Or the book can be read as an account of 19th American history and culture, for a great many things invented, perfected, fully realized, or otherwise prominent in 19th Chicago history – the rise of the skyscraper (including the advancement of related technologies such as fireproofing buildings and building better and better elevators), the advent of professional baseball, the origins of colorful sportswriters working for newspapers, the rise of machine politics, the increasing conflicts between industrialists and organized labor, the rise of social and urban reformists, the growing importance of the railroad, the invention of the department store (particularly focusing on the “supersalesmen” Marshall Field, who with a few others “invented the American department store and made it an anchor institution of a greatly transformed downtown” but had his hand in many other things, such as establishing the Field Museum of Natural History with $1 million of his own money), the spread of workingmen and workingwomen accessible libraries, museums, and classical orchestras, American society coming to grips with regulating or outlawing gambling dens and houses of prostitution, the importance of a professional civil service, the integration of Irish immigrants, the industrialization of the beef industry, the advent of clerical workers and typists especially, and especially women, in American offices, the design and layout of offices for major corporations, the writing of the great American novel on or set in the big city – all are covered, often at length, in this sprawling book, for “the epic of Chicago is the story of modern America.” The full title of the book isn’t hyperbole, as in essence in many ways this book is the history of America, or at least a large portion of it, and not just events, but the history of bedrock concepts and institutions, something someone not necessarily interested in Chicago history but American history as a whole would benefit from reading.
  
  I usually write a book review essay from notes I take (I don’t always take notes for works of fiction but I always do for non-fiction). It’s 8 pages of notes! I feel like a took a college course on 19th century Chicago (and some decent coverage of the Chicago area prior to the 19th century). I took so many notes if I really went through them for this review it would probably result in a five or six page review, far more than anyone I think on Goodreads would want to read. This book covers A LOT, and though a few times it gets lost in the weeds a bit (there is more than you might ever want to know about the engineering and architectural history of 19th century Chicago and New York skyscrapers) it has a good pace and a fairly strong narrative drive. Some of the juicier highlights of the book; the rise of the skyscraper was “actually in the quest for light, not height” (the author quoting William Le Baron Jenney in a lengthy section describing the hows and whys skyscrapers got higher and higher, the author calling the skyscraper “Chicago’s great contribution to architectural history”), that there were many who regarded the Haymarket Square riot as one of the “chief” tragedies of the latter years of the 19th century and the following trial was “perhaps the most dramatic trial in the history of American jurisprudence and easily one of the most unjust” (the Haymarket event is well covered in the book), that the “defining civic debate of nineteenth-century Chicago” was the “city’s long-standing battle between the right of business to do as it pleased and the public’s right to protection from the dangers of unchecked commercial growth,” the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (which required the most advanced machinery and over 8,000 laborers to blast and channel their way through 40 miles of ground, including 15 miles of solid rock) required more land to be excavated than the production of the Panama Canal (the Chicago canal also is well covered in the book), and the working-class saloon was once “a neighborhood institution second in importance only to the family and the parish church,” a place where people stopped on their way to the factory, ate their lunch (free in many saloons), that it functioned as the local newspaper, a place for arriving immigrants to find a job (there or elsewhere, but hearing about it at the saloon), acting as a bank and a post office, a place to use the phone when they first started appearing in the 1880s, and even as a place to sleep (“some immigrant boarders would pay the saloonkeeper a nickel to sleep on his wooden floor”).
  
  There is a lot in the book. I liked, especially early on, how the author related the importance of geography to the history of the city, both local physical geography and political geography in terms of distances and relative positions of other places like New York or St. Louis. The accounts of the Great Chicago Fire were gripping and page turning. The author gave a good balance of showing everyday life in Chicago along with discussing the great themes of the nineteenth century. There was some skillful weaving of the biographies of the many major historical figures of Chicago from socialist Eugene V. Debs to urban reformer Jane Adams to Daniel Hudson Burnham (Director of Works for the World’s Columbian Exposition) to novelist and journalist Theodor Dreiser to John Wellborn Root (architect, one of the founders of the Chicago style) to William Butler Ogden (first mayor of Chicago) to Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard (builder of Chicago’s first stockyard and a major reason for the initial Chicago land boom) to Carter Harrison Sr. (legendary Chicago mayor, mayor during the Haymarket Riot of 1886 and the World’s Columbian Exposition). There are some maps and many contemporary illustrations.
  
• 
  Stephanie

  I made it 121 pages and had to give up. It's not a bad book, so far pretty good, I'm just not in the headspace for a history of rich white men right now. Maybe some day I'll try it again
• 
  Patrick Smith

  I read the first 75% or so of this book last year and then I couldn't find my kindle charger, started reading other things and just finally got back to finishing it. I don't think it would be as enjoyable for people that don't live in Chicago but I loved it and learned a lot. My favorite part was learning my streets and places have the names they do. If you want to have a bunch of fun facts to impress and eventually annoy your friends and/or significant others when you're out and about around the city this is the book for you.
• 
  Heather Wood

  By no means comprehensive, but I did learn a lot. It makes me wonder, when a historian writes about one city over the course of 75 years, how they choose what to include and what not to include. I got a good introduction into what made/makes Chicago unique and how people had/have completely contrasting experiences there. I especially enjoyed learning about aspects of American culture that originated there, such as aspects of the commodities trade and the retail industry. The architecture chapter went largely over my head, but I grew to understand more how it influences culture and vice versa.
• 
  Nicholas Infusino

  Wonderful history of early Chicago. Miller’s writing occupies that rare middle ground between academic and accessible, which makes City of the Century both rigorous but also highly readable. Additionally, Miller does a great job of telling the stories of both the capitalists and the commoners, without taking sides, trusting the reader to decide whose narrative they favor. I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn real chicago history, not just a retread of Capone and the Daleys.
• 
  Becky Loader

  Great biography of Chicago. I was engrossed about the White City, but as per usual, I have a lot of trouble reading about the stockyards and the meat industry that was a big part of the growth of Chicago.
  
  The photos are first rate.
• 
  Adrian Buck

  Superb, and very similar in form to
  Budapest 1900. But more emphasis is given to the impact of technology in the development of the world's first industrial metropolis (Manchester?). I for one needed to know the role of the typewriter in the opening up of clerical work to women, the consequences of which the industrial world is still living with: and failing to address.
• 
  Janis

  I was entirely absorbed by this book, which chronicles the rise and fall (and rise and fall) of Chicago from the explorations of Marquette and Joliet and its inception as a fur-trading outpost through the class struggles of the Pullman strikes in 1894. Donald Miller drew such thorough and fascinating pictures of each era that with every chapter I wished that I could go back in time to experience the Chicago he described.
• 
  Tanya

  I plowed through this dense history of Chicago over the past week in preparation for my trip to the Windy City. I wouldn't say it was enjoyable, but it was very educational! Chicago is unique in that it went from a muddy frontier outpost to a world class city in the space of 50 years, so I really wanted to understand how this came about.
  
  Chicago, plain and simple, is a child of capitalism. It didn't grow by the banks of the river because it was an ideal location for a city, but because the retreating glaciers and the general geography of America made it an ideal hub for the nation's fledgling railroad system. Nearly every industry in the area, whether it be meat packing, McCormick's reapers, steelyards, Pullman's railroad cars, or even construction arose directly out of this fact. A coalition of ambitious and determined men recognized this early on, and devoted their careers to the realization of urban creation.
  
  But a paradise for industry does not a utopia make. Chicago quickly became the most unhealthy city in America, and it wasn't until 1900 with the completion of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal that they even had clean water! Poverty and vice were also a huge problem in 19th century Chicago, especially among the huge immigrant population, most notably from Germany and Ireland. This led to political corruption on an unbelievable scale, and played a large role in the labor strikes of the late 1800s. The sections of Miller's large (I know I keep emphasizing how long the book is, but it's big and heavy and packed a lot of words on every page!) tome that dealt with these topics I found very interesting.
  
  I was less interested in the long section on the city's architecture. I know this is a big draw for visitors to Chicago, and I can appreciate that this is the birthplace of the skyscraper, but I'm just not that interested in architectural innovations! I also had to push harder to get through the details of Chicago's big businessmen and the growth of their corporations. It just goes to reinforce that I'm a social historian at heart.
  
  I'm sure a lot happened in Chicago in the 20th century, but this particular book is about the making of Chicago, and only gives glimpses of the city past 1900. Other authors will have to write those pages, and maybe I'll read them another time...
  
  So... if you, like me, plan to visit Chicago and like to do massive amounts of research beforehand, then this is the book for you. Otherwise, you will probably be all right to skip it! But I'm still giving it 4 stars for being a comprehensive, well-researched, and solid history. Now I get to go enjoy the real thing!!
• 
  Richard Brown

  City of the Century is a well-conceived comprehensive survey of the social, economic, and political factors that led to the rapid development of Chicago in the nineteenth century. I’m familiar with the city and found the history interesting and learned some new things about the city. Those who don’t have a particular interest in Chicago, however, may have a harder time getting through this book that sometimes gets bogged down in detail. Although the book covered the period from Joliet and Marquette’s exploration of the area that became Chicago up to the Columbian Exposition of 1893, about two-thirds of the book was concentrated on the last two decades of the 19th century. I think Professor Miller should have given more attention to the earlier period, and he could have eliminated much of the lengthy explanation related to architecture and construction of various buildings. I had a hard time keeping my eyes open through that. However, the last section of the book in which the author delved into the conflicts and issues pitting the entrenched protestant old guard and the newer immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, captured my attention. His description of the deplorable conditions of the immigrants, the exploitation by those in power, and the social changes underway as reflected in news reports and social commentaries was deeply moving. It was hard to escape the relevance of the social divisions of the 19th century to current conditions in America, where race, ethnicity, and national origin continue to be explosive elements impacting American society, both for good and for ill.
• 
  Emily

  I started reading this book (for the third time) when we journeyed to Chicago to see Hamilton in April 2018. Two years later...
  
  I wanted to enjoy this book so much more than I did. I didn’t want it to be a slog. I wanted it to be the hefty nonfiction volume that recaptured my attention span lost somewhere in the haze of grad school. Sadly, it wasn’t. I picked the book up and put it down more times than I can count. Though it is clearly exhaustively researched and written with an accessible anecdotal style, the sheer volume of white male protagonists (and Miller names ALL of them) that feature in Miller’s telling of the city’s founding was a bit too daunting for this reader.
  
  I specify “Miller’s telling” because there is a history of Chicago that doesn’t sideline the contributions of women and people of color to such an extreme degree as the one told in this book. Though Miller is careful to criticize the rampant exploitation of the moneyed, or at least cunning, white men who ostensibly built the city from swamp to metropolis, he tells the story of “The New Chicago Woman” in a single nine-page chapter, and dispatches with people of color in four pages starting on page 502.
  
  Which is likely why it took me two years to get through what is otherwise a fascinating time period for one of America’s great cities: the book is a bit boring. The last hundred pages detailing the life of the World’s Fair, the Age of Industry, and some of the more nuanced political and ideological dramas was worth the slog. There is a great story embedded here; it just takes a bit too long to uncover.
• 
  Nate Bate

  I've had this book on my shelf for about a year, and I've been looking forward to reading it. Also, as I have read it, I was interrupted many times with other things. So, my impressions of it are somewhat skewed. And, this was my first history of a major city that I read.
  
  On the whole, I liked the book. Subjectively, however, I felt like Miller went into too much detail sometimes. I gleaned a ton of great info on Chicago, but usually the first third of the chapter was enough, and then the rest felt like extra that only an enthusiast would want. And, perhaps that is who Miller is targeting here. I have a book on NYC that I am going to read soon, and we will see what I think of that. I'm wondering if I don't like to read the history of cities as much as individuals or countries.
• 
  Becky

  This audiobook was a good way to get to know Chicago history focused on the 19th century while also getting to know the mythology around Chicago -- the brashness, the big shoulders, the ambition, the muscular bravado. It focused a little more on the "great men" of Chicago than I would have liked -- of course these are all white settler men -- but it did point out the contradictions of the unbridled capitalism that characterized early Chicago and the resulting mass labor movements. The ending felt abrupt -- I wanted to hear about the 20th century too but that would have been a very, very long book.
• 
  Mike

  Impressive and enjoyable
  
  I appreciated the depth but approachability in Miller’s writing. It was fun to read about Chicago becoming and re-becoming a new city as I myself am becoming a new resident, experiencing the place for the first time.
  
  And as someone coming to this book with basically no knowledge of Chicago history, I was struck by how many “big names” started or came to prominence here, from Pullman to Debs to Wright to McCormick to Field and many, many more.
  
  Read this if you have an interest in Chicago before the fair and are willing to sit up and absorb a tone that is a tough more serious than purely popular history.
• 
  Kaesa

  This book was fantastic, although possibly I am a little biased because I'm also reading a very badly-written book about Chicago history as well. But this one is well-researched, well-written, clear, well-cited, generally a joy to read -- although of course it is also very long, and I am very behind on my reading challenges. Still! A really good overview of the 19th century in Chicago, which strikes the right balance between highlighting the contributions of influential and important individuals and presenting their ideas and views fairly, and discussing the influence of broader historical trends and how the unnamed and unremembered people of the past might have felt.
• 
  Jeffrey

  Audible version. This is the best general history of Chicago that I have read. (this does not include Nature's Metropolis, which I would label an economic history). Quite sweeping in scope and decently written. Initially I thought it had too much of a civic booster focus, but over the course of the book, it explored corruption, poverty, racism and other less flattering topics. Ends at the end of the 19th century, as implied by the title. I bought the book as well to use as a reference as I think it will be useful for that purpose.
• 
  Sean O

  The city of Chicago grew from nothing to the greatest city in the west in less than 70 years. This book is a fascinating story of how it got that way. Starting with Marquette and Joliet and ending with the burning of the "White City" at the end of the 19th Century, Chicago grew and was formed by an all-star cast of Americans: Architects, Businessmen, Politicians, Reporters, Riff raff, and Do-gooders.
  
  This book didn't really talk much about the "Making of America" but it certainly is the "Epic of Chicago."
  
  Five stars means I will read it again.
  
  Sean O
• 
  William Brown

  This is a very long, (850) page, but very interesting history of the building of Chicago in the 19th Century, from its founding thru the 1893 Columbian Exposition. It focuses on the men, particularly the businessmen, who created it, from the canals to railroads, meat packing, architects, industrialists, bankers, and civic leaders. It's a long book, but a very interesting one, particularly if you are from there and always wondered who all those streets were named for.
• 
  Brian

  Chicago has a rich history and I really enjoyed listening to it all. This book is very dense. It wasn't a great audiobook in that it was difficult to keep pace with the people and years as it was jumping around based on core points (architecture, worlds fair, etc) instead of being a general timeline.