"Condensed yet energetic and substantial history of Chicago. Spinney has a firm sense of historical narrative as well as a keen eye for entertaining and illuminating detail."― Publishers Weekly A city of immigrants and entrepreneurs, Chicago is quintessentially American. Spinney brings it to life and highlights the key people, moments, and special places—from Fort Dearborn to Cabrini-Green, Marquette to Mayor Daley, the Union Stock Yards to the Chicago Bulls—that make this incredible city one of the best places in the world. City of Big Shoulders links key events in Chicago's development, from its marshy origins in the 1600s to today's robust metropolis. Robert G. Spinney presents Chicago in terms of the people whose lives made the city—from the tycoons and the politicians to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world. In this revised and updated second edition that brings Chicago's story into the twenty-first century, Spinney sweeps his historian's gaze across the colorful and dramatic panorama of the city's explosive past. How did the pungent swamplands that the Native Americans called "the wild-garlic place" burgeon into one of the world's largest and most sophisticated cities? What is the real story behind the Great Chicago Fire? What aspects of American industry exploded with the bomb in Haymarket Square? Could the gritty blue-collar hometown of Al Capone become a visionary global city?

Written in the poet's unique personal idiom, these early poems include "Chicago," "Fog," "Who Am I?" "Under the Harvest Moon," plus more on war, love, death, loneliness and the beauty of nature.

Great American City demonstrates the powerfully enduring impact of place. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Robert J. Sampson’s Great American City presents the fruits of over a decade’s research to support an argument that we all feel and experience every day: life is decisively shaped by your neighborhood. Engaging with the streets and neighborhoods of Chicago, Sampson, in this new edition, reflects on local and national changes that have transpired since his book’s initial publication, including a surge in gun violence and novel forms of segregation despite an increase in diversity. New research, much of it a continuation of the influential discoveries in Great American City, has followed, and here, Sampson reflects on its meaning and future directions. Sampson invites readers to see the status of the research initiative that serves as the foundation of the first edition—the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN)—and outlines the various ways other scholars have continued his work. Both accessible and incisively thorough, Great American City is a must-read for anyone interested in cutting-edge urban sociology and the study of crime.

At the turn of the last century, as industrialists and workers made Chicago the hardworking City of Big Shoulders celebrated by Carl Sandburg, Chicago women articulated an alternative City of Homes in which the welfare of residents would be the municipal government's principal purpose. Seeing With Their Hearts traces the formation of this vision from the relief efforts following the Chicago fire of 1871 through the many political battles of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In the process, it presses a new understanding of the roles of women in public life and writes a new history of urban America. Heeding the call of activist Louise de Koven Bowen to become third-class passengers on the train of life, thousands of women "put their shoulders to the wheel and their whole hearts into the work" of fighting for better education, worker protections, clean air and water, building safety, health care, and women's suffrage. Though several well-known activists appeared frequently in these initiatives, Maureen Flanagan offers compelling evidence that women established a broad and durable solidarity that spanned differences of race, class, and political experience. She also shows that these women--emphasizing their common identity as women seeking a city amenable to the needs of women, children, families, and homes--pursued a vision and goals distinct from the reform agenda of Progressive male activists. They fought hard and sometimes successfully in a variety of public places and sites of power, winning victories from increased political clout and prenatal care to municipal garbage collection and pasteurized milk. While telling the fascinating and in some cases previously untold stories of women activists during Chicago's formative period, this book fundamentally recasts urban social and political history.

“Chicago is a tale of two cities,” headlines declare. This narrative has been gaining steam alongside reports of growing economic divisions and diverging outlooks on the future of the city. Yet to keen observers of the Second City, this is nothing new. Those who truly know Chicago know that for decades—even centuries—the city has been defined by duality, possibly since the Great Fire scorched a visible line between the rubble and the saved. For writers like Alex Kotlowitz, the contradictions are what make Chicago. And it is these contradictions that form the heart of Never a City So Real. The book is a tour of the people of Chicago, those who have been Kotlowitz’s guide into this city’s – and by inference, this country’s – heart. Chicago, after all, is America’s city. Kotlowitz introduces us to the owner of a West Side soul food restaurant who believes in second chances, a steelworker turned history teacher, the “Diego Rivera of the projects,” and the lawyers and defendants who populate Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building. These empathic, intimate stories chronicle the city’s soul, its lifeblood. This new edition features a new afterword from the author, which examines the state of the city today as seen from the double-paned windows of a pawnshop. Ultimately, Never a City So Real is a love letter to Chicago, a place that Kotlowitz describes as “a place that can tie me up in knots but a place that has been my muse, my friend, my joy.”

This book documents stories of the Depression and presents historical images from the Chicago Public LIbrary, the LIbrary of Congress, the FBI, the National Archives, the collections of John Chuckman, original press photographs, and many private collections.

Chicago has served as touchstone and muse to generations of writers and artists defined by their relationship to the city’s history, lore, inhabitants, landmarks, joys and sorrows, pride and shame. The poetic conversations inspired by Chicago have long been a vital part of America’s literary landscape, from Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks to experimental writers and today’s slam poets. The one hundred contributors to this vibrant collection take their materials and their inspirations from the city itself in a way that continues this energetic dialogue. The cultural, ethnic, and aesthetic diversity in this gathering of poems springs from a variety of viewpoints, styles, and voices as multifaceted and energetic as the city itself. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz: “I want to eat / in a city smart enough to know that if you / are going to have that heart attack, you might / as well have the pleasure of knowing // you’ve really earned it”; Renny Golden: “In the heat of May 1937, my grandfather / sits in the spring grass of an industrial park / with hundreds of striking steelworkers”; Joey Nicoletti: “The wind pulls a muscle / as fans yell the vine off the outfield wall, / mustard-stained shirts, hot dog smiles, and all.” The combined energies of these poems reveal the mystery and beauty that is Second City, the City by the Lake, New Gotham, Paris on the Prairie, the Windy City, the Heart of America, and Sandburg’s iconic City of the Big Shoulders.