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

by Donald L. Miller

From its turbulent beginnings to its current status as one of the world’s most dynamic cities, City of the Century tells the story of Chicago—and the story of America, writ small. From its many natural disasters, including the Great Fire of 1871 and several cholera epidemics to its winner-take-all politics, dynamic business empires, breathtaking architecture, its diverse cultures, and its diverse population of writers, journalists, and artists, Chicago’s story is violent, inspiring, passionate, and fascinating from the first page to the last.

The winner of the prestigious Great Lakes Book Award, given to the year’s most outstanding books highlighting the American heartland, City of the Century has received consistent rave reviews and was made into a six-hour film airing on PBS’s American Experience series. Written with energetic prose and exacting detail, it brings Chicago’s history to vivid life.


Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History at Lafayette College and author of nine books, including Supreme How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America (May 2014); City of the Century , winner of the Great Lakes Book Award and the Victorian Society's Presidential Book Award; Lewis Mumford , A Life , a New York Times Notable Book; and the critically acclaimed Masters of the Air , which is being made into an HBO dramatic series by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. He has hosted, co-produced, or served as historical consultant for more than 30 television documentaries and has written for the New York Times , the Washington Post , and other publications.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Architecture, Audiobook, Cities, American

722 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 1996

About the author

Dr. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History at Lafayette College and an expert on World War II, among other topics in American history. Three of his eight books are on WWII: D-Days in the Pacific (2005), the story of the American re-conquest of the Pacific from Imperial Japan; Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany (2006); and The Story of World War II (2001), all published by Simon & Schuster.

Reviews

[Rosalinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

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. ;)

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd never read a general history of Chicago covering the nineteenth century before, just books about specific topics or ones about more contemporary events. This one ranges from the retreat of the last glaciers through the Columbian Exposition with especial attention to the physical character of the land and the engineering work accommodating it to the growing city. Beyond this, attention if paid to the sociology and economic development of Chicago, with brief biographies of some of its leading citizens.

[Maggie Needham · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was honestly a little surprised by how much I ended up liking this book. The beginning of it felt oddly old-fashioned: the descriptions of Marquette and Jolliet's expedition to the northern Mississippi felt like it belong in an earlier generation of history books. However, as the book went on, it felt more modern and, in particular, did a really good job of covering the labor movement and the plight of working-class Chicagoans.

I was quite happy with Miller's prose, and his imagery in describing the city. I found that I learned a lot of interesting things from the book, not just about Chicago but about Nineteenth Century American urban life in general, some of which I would like to find books on to read more. Particularly noteworthy was the discussion of the transition of American white-collar work from being the domain of general-purpose clerks who became familiar with the operations of a business and could often make the jump from clerical work to management to being the domain of much-less-skilled, usually female, secretaries and typists, supplemented by vertical filing cabinets and standardized filing systems.

Another topic I found interesting was the discussion of the class consequences of Sunday closing laws. I'd always understood Sunday closing laws for businesses (particularly taverns) and the closing of cultural institutions on Sundays to have been a matter of Christian fundamentalists trying to enforce their morality on society. However, it also had a significant classism component: blue-collar workers usually worked ten hours a day, six days a week, and Sunday was their only day off. Closing taverns on Sundays was often intended as a way to keep them from drinking, as much as it was motivated by religious morality. Likewise, a number of cultural institutions in Nineteenth Century Chicago apparently closed their doors on Sundays with a fairly explicit goal of keeping out the unwashed.

[Tim Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Jarrod S]

Reads much more like a history of a 19th-century Chicago’s richest businessmen than a history of the city in that time. When Miller does dip into larger economic, political, or social trends, he finds rich material. It’s too rare. Individual biographies should’ve augmented the main narrative, not the other way around. Compounding the issue is that most (though not all) biographies cover the same type of person: industrial baron. Miller makes a compelling argument that this class was responsible for much of Chicago’s growth, but that doesn’t mean they should take up this much of the page count. There are a variety of perspectives missing from the history, then, including immigrant and ethnic histories, women’s history, religious and institutional histories, sports, etc.

I appreciated some of the environmental arguments Miller makes, and am excited to read Nature’s Metropolis, which Miller cites.

Good maps.

[Logan Crossley · Rating 4 out of 5]

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).

[Lauren Hiebner · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well written history of Chicago from its founding, the challenges of building city infrastructure, the Chicago fire, to the 1893 Exposition. Miller also gives a brief biography of all the people that made Chicago truly the “first American city.”

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

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)

[Aidan Busch · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The white city’s richest legacy is the confidence of its builders in the possibilities of urban life, their unassailable belief that the modern metropolis, with its enormous and multiplying problems, could be made over into a conscious work of art. Bht a great city is not a work of inspired and serene painting, static and splendid. It is a living drama with a huge and varied cast and a plot filled with conflict, tension, spectacle, and significance.”

An epic, if incomplete, history of Chicago at its most dramatic: the decades preceding the turn of the 20th century. A fascinating read that helped me to think a lot about the character and nature of this city I live adjacent to and work in.

At times I found myself frustrated that many of the incredible structures and locations described in the book have long sense been torn down - I love an old building - but that very fact is illustrative of one of Chicago’s most enduring characteristics; it has the ability to reinvent itself and transform on the basis of making a buck. This leads to moments of profound ugliness in the history of the city but also is one of the sources of its incredible vitality. It helps explain why it remains a magnetic place, and why it, above other midwestern cities, continues to thrive and wrestle with a changing modern economy while others rust and crumble.

“City of the Century” indeed.

[Adrian Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a long time to read this book but enjoyed it immensely. It moves along quickly and the author does a good time making it readable. I basically covers the birth and growth of Chicago up through the Columbia Exposition in the late 19th century. Along the way, we see the development of the country reflected in the changes in the city.

There are many surprising parts, but one of my favorites was how the buildings downtown were lifted to enable sewers to be laid in the street. There is an illustration for this as well as some of the notable people and buildings.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Eric Brauneis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really a fantastic, ambitious look at Chicago’s rise in the 1800s.

For a 750 page book it’s highly readable and coherent, and benefits from focusing on themes rather than unfolding as a simple chronological order of events.

The book is filled with great anecdotes and paints a brilliant picture of the spirit of the city, particularly between 1871 (the fire) and 1893 (the fair). It touches on economic, agricultural, artistic, cultural, civic and political movements and events of the day and felt comprehensive.

It’s a good complement to other Chicago histories, the popular Devil in the White City and the under-hyped Nature’s Metropolis, and in my opinion, the most enriching of the three.

[Becky Loader · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Carter Spence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved going through this book about the history of19th century Chicago. Truly some amazing stories in there. Also proud of myself for finishing a 550 page book on this topic. I definitely recommend it. As an engineering-thinking person, I loved reading about the raising of the city to build a sewer system, reversing the flow of the river, and the innovative ways to build skyscrapers.

[Marsha Altman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book on the history of Chicago up to about 1900. It spends a lot of time on architecture and city planning, which the author makes interesting but can still be a little slow.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful overview of my home city, and almost every local story is set within the context of general American history. The historiography is up to date as well. The book covers exploration, Native America, early settlers, the Chicago Fire, the World’s Fair, Olmsted, immigration, Hull House, the University of Chicago, Pullman, anarchism , labor relations, skyscraper architecture, naturalist literature, the stockyards, et cetera and so on. The great migration and Black Chicago in general might have received more attention, but another great book, The Warmth of Other Suns, can provide the remedy.

[John Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considerable information packaged into this long book on the start of Chicago until 1900. There are many interesting stories and details of some of the characters (Warning: You better like to learn a lot about white men because almost all characters fit that mode.) and decisions made that are still evident in this beautiful city today. For those who love this incredible city or those who love history on cities, this is a book well worth reading. While I fit into both categories, I wish Miller had a stronger editor to cut the pages but increase more of how it was to actually live in Chicago during the 1800’s.

Miller does a good job explaining how a Wisconsin glacier gave Chicago an advantage over another prairie town, St. Louis. The glacier provided a gap that later made the Erie Canal and New York Central Railroad possible, providing good transportation of people and goods to and from New York City. It was surprising to me that the biggest obstacle the township had when it was founded in 1833 with 150 residents. Stagecoaches would get caught in mud but, later, a steamboat was able to travel with people, goods, and mail from New York City in just six days. When the canal was cut, the population of Chicago rose from must over 20,000 to 75,000. Developers used a grid system for streets with few parks or public places to maximize profits and make it simpler. The city still didn’t see the real engine of progress – railroads. While in 1847, the city lacked any access to railroads, a decade later it was the center of America for rail.

Like other towns, especially in the Midwest, industry changed the city’s growth patterns. Cyrus Hall McCormick with his Reaper, the Pullman Company, Illinois Steel, Otis Elevator, Self Winding Clock Company, pork processing (replacing Cincinnati’s designation of Porkopolis) due to transportation, life insurance companies, and retailers like Marshall Fields, Sears, and Montgomery Ward & Company.

Most interesting in the entire book was how the fire that brook out in Mrs. Patrick O’Leary’s barn took place – and how it greatly impacted the city for the good. Repeatedly, the city had fires but the winds that night changed everything. The fire left 90,000 people homeless out of a city of about 300,000 and nearly 300 dead. Even before the fire, the city was not being raised in a long-term basis and left most people out of any quality of life. According to this well researched book, 74% of the families were destitute with 1% of the population owning 52% of the city’s wealth and 10% of the families owning 94% of the wealth during this period. Over half of the population of the city were foreign born – Germans, Irish, followed by the Bohemians, and the Scandinavians.

All changed the morning – and subsequent days – of October 8th. The fire from the Irish, poor area of the city spread quickly with heavy winds. The 185 firefighters with limited fire equipment were no match for a fire and mother nature. The fire made eleven blocks of homes ashes within the first hour. Lost was seventy-three miles of streets and 17,450 building equating to $190 million of value ($4.5 billion in today’s dollars).

The city that arises from the ashes of that horrible fire was cleaner, safer, and more magnificent. Transportation within the city required a vibrant streetcar system that they developed. I remember reading that Cincinnati’s growth (once the largest city in Ohio) was set back because of poor transportation. Chicago got it. And they got suburbs because of their ability to build a strong public transit system.

One of the most interesting chapters in the entire book the rise of the skyscraper. This was the late 1800’s when the challenges were greater, technology and architecture were still changing, and the comparison was with New York City. The great fire left vacant lots that could be better used and the fears of a fire provided true, safer buildings. Miller highlighted the importance of the elevator to the rise of skyscrapers, not just having them but better technology. This book mentions that Otis died in 1861 before he could see the society impact of his hoisting machinery, something his sons had to then do. After 1880 until the end of the century, Chicago rushed ahead of New York City with raising tall buildings. It was surprising to read that the architects in Chicago designing the city’s skyline were just in their 30’s, a fresh view of the future they themselves could enjoy. Because Chicago lacked the true wealth of New York companies, the Chicago skyscrapers were built for production while many in New York were expensive corporate advertising.

The lacking portion of the chapter on building these magnificent skyscrapers was no mention about the men (back then it was nearly entirely men) who built these record breaking buildings at risk of their own lives. There was nothing about the building trades that stood up the building and the quality of life for those who were building these structures. There was little discussion on the workers inside the buildings – how they were treated, where they lived, or how they felt about working so high up.

Later in the book, Miller did outline some of the struggles of working people but did it on a fairly superficial level, mentioning major players in labor and big fights. He didn’t talk about how workers were treated, the risks they were taking to take on their boss. Instead he covers the conventional struggles all history books of this era or of Chicago would cover – the Pullman strike, Haymarket Square, and Upton Sinclair. This doesn’t say much for an author who has done considerable research. A book this dense should bring to his reader a better understanding of life of people who lived in Chicago over 100 years ago.

The same can be said about his treatment of women (not even mentioned until, I believe page 450), Blacks, and Asians. While it would be the next century when African Americans would migrate to the north, including Chicago, he barely mentioned anything about people of color. He does highlight a few women but doesn’t really talk about what life was like for women living in those times – in that city.

The last half of the book highlights the Fair that closed off the century and the creation of arts and culture, an important ingredient in making Chicago a great city today. It was interesting to read but didn’t capture my attention despite loving culture arts.

Reading about cities, especially one like Chicago we love to visit so often, brought me to this book. But David McCullough’s strong endorsement on the back cover made me pick up this book before others on my shelf. Clearly the famous historic writer loved this book more than I did.

[Richard Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Daniel Elliott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chicago’s growth through the 19th century is a great story. Chicago was the capital of the second indistrial revolution. It was the first great American boom town.

I read this book because I love Nature’s Metropolis and I wanted someone to fill in the stories of the city from that era beyond the deep economic forces that made it and made the Midwest. This book did a solidly ok job of doing that. There’s a lot of Nature’s Metropolis regurgitation, and there isn’t a great sense of pacing or focus, but there is a decent amount of coverage of most things you want to know about.

The book left me really wanting some good labor business and labor history of the city that really focuses on the rise, various transformations, and eventual decline of factory-type labor in the city in the century from 1860-1960 or so. The first 30-40 years of that story get smatterings of coverage here through the most famous companies, riots, murders, strikes, and so on. But again, even that every exciting story is told a bit thinly and chaotically for my tastes. I’ll just have to keep looking!

[Wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Fantastic Voyage into Chicago's History

Grab my hand and step onto this river tug, this workhorse that takes you through Chicago's history. This is perhaps one of the best traditional histories I've ever read. The elegant way in which we are taken from the founding of Chicago to the Pullman Strike is just delightful I kept wondering how he'd cover this or that but he slides into new topics like smooth sherbet. As a Chicago land native I learned a tremendous amount about my homeland and reinforced that you can't understand the history of America without Chicago.

[JMM · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had read this with my eyes shortly after I first moved to Chicago--20 or so years ago--and appreciated the refresher. This takes the history of the city up to 1900 and it does an especially good job highlighting architecture and the 1893 Columbian Exhibition. It is a great look at what formed the city--the good and the bad. I'm glad to have listened to this.

[David Eppenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent history of the greatest American city, Chicago.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book slowly, and I am so glad I did. I thought, when I first got it, how can there be 24 hours (audio) or that many pages of a book on just one century of Chicago? I LEARNED SO MUCH.

I've always wanted to visit the city, and my kids took trips there in the last year and learned a lot about the culture and history, so I feel like I should go now, after reading the book. I will appreciate the architecture, the areas, the water, the transportation, all of it so much more.

From the beginning of the book, I was interested in the chapter about the priest and the explorer. Seeing what the land was like 2-300 years ago to what it is now - wow! Even what it was like in the 1800s is astounding. I kept thinking it would be more primitive, but the designers and engineers were so much ahead of their game.

As a teacher of literature, I loved hearing all the references to authors and the hopes that the great American novel would come out of Chicago. I was excited to see how many names I recognized, and not just authors. I've read books, sometimes fiction, about the inventors, about Pullman, about the dreamers, and about those who tried to gain more rights for all people. But this book just connected what they were doing in Chicago to how it impacted the rest of the country.

I loved loved the chapters on the skyscrapers being built and how workers wanted to move from Chicago because they could have jobs but also because they could explore their talents and dreams. Even the conductor of the symphony achieved his dreams. That was cool. I like the imagery - thinking about tall buildings, useful buildings, but also those buildings being beautiful and appealing, drawing people from all over.

I liked learning about the art museum and the classes there, and the philanthropy of some of those involved in making it what it was.

I was very interested to learn about Pullman. I always hear good things about what he did and his Pullman car, but thinking about the town of Pullman and its setup, with the nicer buildings up front, but then the truth about the treatment of workers further back so that visitors could not see. My son said he toured that area and that it was shocking to see and think about.

The engineering feat of being able to make water transportation and tourist activities was so cool. I never thought that 100 years ago, there could be moving walkways for 5k people in Chicago or anywhere. WOW!

I did not know about the Haymarket incident. That chapter was interesting, but I did not like learning about Harrison and his antics.

It was interesting learning about the relationships between the important people - those designing and building the skyscrapers and then other buildings. What cool partnerships they had, with each drawing on and relying on the other's strengths.

I knew about the Great Fire from another book I read recently, but this one with its facts was just "WOW." And then the way they rebuilt was impressive.

The World's Fair - I wish I could have seen it. It sounds amazing. I'm always intrigued by city planning, even with the Olympics. When a major event is coming, they start planning and building years before. Just laying it all out, figuring out what is best, how to draw crowds, how to feed and transport people - I am in awe of those people preparing for the Fairs and the Olympics. I thought it was GREAT!

I have always been interested in McCormick and the mechanical reaper, even when I was a kid, so I liked that chapter. The information about the pig processing - kind of gross but good to think about. Maybe it isn't best to save money by using all parts of the pig.

I am not a big shopper, but learning about Sears and then the other stores, the mail order catalogs (I loved those as a kid, circling my favorite things), the trust system with shipping items out before they were paid for - JUST SO COOL!

Overall, I have to say I learned SO MUCH, and I really need to check myself sometimes when I assume that a generation or certain group isn't as advanced or doesn't think like people do now. I am thankful for progress and for the people who paved the way to make today better.