A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft
Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's
Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic,
urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful,
powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson,
Boston Globe
In
this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental
perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By
exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago
America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr.
Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story
of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so
powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed
American culture. The world that emerged is our own.
