You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There's a lot of great historiography here - a solid explanation of how the Chicago Board of Trade (i. Cronon argues that our society's strict dichotomy between nature and city overlooks their tangled histories. But for those of us who specialize in African American history, this, too, at first seems to be another one of those topics on which Cronon will have “little to say.

The history of environment and the history of sexuality are subfields of American history that arguably share less conversation than any two other subfields I can name. Under this proposed system, students could avoid college debt by engaging in agreements with investors who would fund their education in exchange for a share of future income. If he had used some more modern work in urban development from someone like Ed Glaeser or Paul Krugman (who later wrote an excellent paper on this very book) I think readers would have benefited, but otherwise it was genius. Spatial history is, broadly speaking, the study of how spatial relations and geographical patterns shape historical processes.Reading this book so soon after The Box brought home a lot of lessons on how miraculous our current standard of living is: in some ways the Industrial Revolution has never ended, and the great wave of commerce that stretches back to the early 1800s has only begun for most of the world. Fox, A History of the Lumber Industry in the State of New York, USDA, Bureau of Forestry Bulletin no. 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. And Cronon’s exclusion of African Americans from his later chapter examining motivations for rural residents to migrate to the city is curious indeed. Unlike the typical maps that appear in historical monographs, these maps don’t just show geographical context; they explicitly advance Cronon’s larger argument about the flows of capital that knit the region together.

The frame is explicitly economic, and much attention is paid to futures trading and loan debts; docks, stations, and mills. This focus on commodities, distance, time, speed, and abstraction means that people are the least memorable part of the book. The empirical fact of America’s emergent urban sexual subcultures in the period is beyond dispute, even if this framing relegates them to the “second nature” of social forms freed from a static and ahistorical “familial constraint.New York has been fully postmodernized, but Chicago still is a city of sausage factories and scrap yards.