Nature's metropolis
Argues that the American frontier and city developed together by focusing on Chicago and tracing its roots from Native American habitation to its transformation by white settlement and development.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
5mentions
5people
2013–2024years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'm looking for inspiration for the Christmas holidays.
Mine were: – Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (2000) – William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis (1991) – John Ma, Polis (2024) – John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (1982)
(Apologies if someone has posted something similar recently. I did a quick search and couldn't find anything.)
- > Wood manufacturers faced a significant challenge in the late 1800s when forests near major cities were depleted, necessitating the shipping of lumber over longer distances. However, the exorbitant costs of railroad shipping, often double the price of the lumber itself, prompted manufacturers to find innovative solutions.
There was a book recommended here on HN a few months ago - Nature's Metropolis - that devotes an entire chapter to why and how, in the second half of the 1800s, shipping green lumber to Chicago lumber yards came to dominate the entire industry. Yet that changed very suddenly as the above quote points out.
The TLDR is that within an hour or so of arriving in Chicago, your load of lumber would go to auction, be bought, and you'd have cold hard cash in your pocket. To facilitate this, the Chicago yards all agreed to adopt size and quality standards like the grain elevators had. Other cities paid much more, but took days or weeks and you got a promissory note rather than cash.
But at some point the railroads started charging by weight rather than by carload, and it was worth drying your lumber before shipping. Nobody shipped to those Chicago yards after that, so someone else had to take over the standardization of dried lumber.
- By the way, only tangentially related, but my favorite book on standardization is Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon. It’s inspired a lot of my interest in the intersection of economics, tech, and nature and how we impose standards upon the world.
- This is not the rose-colored answer you might be looking for, but contrary to popular belief (which usually start with Henry Ford) a lot of modern day “management techniques” were actually invented at slavery plantations [1]
I can recommend the following books on the history of capitalism (which is closely linked to the exploitation of labor aka management):
- Empire of Cotton (Sven Beckert)
- Nature’s Metropolis (Cronon)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slav...
- People interested in economics, history, Chicago, or the midwest in general should definitely check out "Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West" by William Cronon.
