Chicago

Located at the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan and in the northeast corner of the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago has been, since its founding in the early nineteenth century, the commercial, industrial, cultural, and transport hub of the American Midwest. In the context of the modern scientific study of urban space, urban culture, and public policy, Chicago has played an outsized part in the production of knowledge about city life. Urbanists have long framed Chicago as a quintessence of modernity, a place where the features and dynamics of distinct eras of urbanization unfolded in exaggerated form. Scholars of the nineteenth century have stressed its origins as a “shock city,” willed into existence by the hype of speculators, the dispossession of Indians, and feats of infrastructure. Those with eyes on the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century have marveled at Chicago’s encapsulation of the extremes of industrial capitalism: its centrifugally sprawling and spewing landscape of factories and feedlots; its pitched battles between labor and capital; its utopian visions of a “City Beautiful”; its dense patchwork of immigrant working-class neighborhoods; and its self-conscious community of ambitious reformers and academics, whose studies of the city sealed its fate as urban hyper-exemplar. In the twentieth century, no city seemed better able to capture the unique paradoxes of the African American encounter with urban modernity. Chicago was at once the proving ground for multiple modern technologies of racial segregation and subordination, and a national mecca of black culture and commerce. It set unenviable records for the social miseries of the postindustrial ghetto, and served as an early and enduring incubator for black political talent. While “Chicago politics” remains a metonym for bossism, corruption, and bitter ethnic rivalries, the city’s political machinery has always been more dynamic than the caricature, whether in its iteration as a midcentury liberal “growth machine” or as a late-century “global city” technocracy. Chicago has served as a sharpening stone for multiple theoretical approaches to American politics. Indeed, entire fields of modern sociology, political science, social work, criminology, literature, architecture, comedy, political organizing, and education reform have relied on Chicago taking a role as laboratory, muse, or foil. As the author Richard Wright famously observed, “Chicago is the known city; perhaps more is known about it, how it is run, how it kills, how it loves, steals, helps, gives, cheats, and crushes than any other city in the world.” The titles assembled here provide continuing support for Wright’s claim.