In this sweeping survey, Milo Milton Quaife traces the events leading from Chicago's emergence as a key outpost at the edge of the frontier to its establishment as the crossroads of American commerce.
 
Strategically located at the head of the Great Lakes on the Chicago portage, one of the main highways connecting the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence waterway with the Mississippi River, Chicago was equally valued by explorers, traders, settlers, and governments.

Quaife narrates the opening of trade and the course of European exploration, facilitated by the Chicago portage and subsequent construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. He profiles the personalities who shaped the early Chicago area, from the French explorers La Salle, Marquette, and Joliet to the ambitious Champlain, who set the course for decades to come by securing for New France the enmity of the Iroquois.
 
Quaife provides a full description of the Indian trade, which constituted the basis of commerce in the region for the entire period covered by the book, as well as a blow-by-blow account of how old rivalries and alliances between Indian tribes complicated the English and French plans for divvying up the New World. He also describes the conflicts between natives and whites with sympathy and detail on both sides, depicting Indian attacks on white settlements as rationally motivated acts aiming toward specific goals of strategy or revenge.
 
First published in 1913, Chicago and the Old Northwest, 1673-1835 is one of the earliest works of a man who became one of the premier scholars of his generation. In a new introduction, Chicago historian Perry R. Duis sketches Quaife's long and varied career, his influence on the history profession, and his crusade to prove that a black trader was the first permanent resident of Chicago.

In Property Rules, Robin L. Einhorn uses City Council records-previously thought destroyed-and census data to track the course of city government in Chicago, providing an important reinterpretation of the relationship between political and social structures in the nineteenth-century American city.

A Choice "Outstanding Academic Book"
"[A] masterful study of policy-making in Chicago."—Choice

"[A] major contribution to urban and political history. . . . [A]n excellent book."—Jeffrey S. Adler, American Historical Review

"[A]n enlightening trip. . . . Einhorn's foray helps make sense out of the transition from Jacksonian to Gilded Age politics on the local level. . . . [She] has staked out new ground that others would do well to explore."—Arnold R. Hirsch, American Journal of Legal History

"A well-documented and informative classic on urban politics."—Daniel W. Kwong, Law Books in Review

The fateful kick of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, the wild flight before the flames, the astonishingly quick rebuilding—these are the well-known stories of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. But as much as Chicago's recovery from disaster was a remarkable civic achievement, the Great Fire is also the story of a city's people divided and at odds. This is the story that Karen Sawislak tells so revealingly in this book.

In a detailed account, drawn on memoirs, private correspondences, and other documents, Sawislak chronicles years of widespread, sometimes bitter, social and political conflict in the fire's wake, from fights over relief soup kitchens to cries against profiteering and marches on city hall by workers burned out of their homes. She shows how through the years of rebuilding the people of Chicago struggled to define civic order—and the role that "good citizens" would play within it. As they rebuilt, she writes, Chicagoans confronted hard questions about charity and social welfare, work and labor relations, morality, and the limits of state power. Their debates in turn exposed the array of values and interests that different class, ethnic, and religious groups brought to these public discussions.

"Sawislak combines the copious detail of a historian with the vivid portrayals of a storyteller in her investigation of the infamous Chicago fire. . . . Highlighted by historical maps, plates and engravings, with an epilogue and notes, Smoldering City presents an extremely thorough and engaging study of this extraordinary disaster."—Publishers Weekly