CHICAGO • NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Annotated bibliography

Chicago Style Annotated Bibliography

A humanities-focused bibliography on the Great Chicago Fire and the remaking of the city

RESEARCH FOCUS

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was both a disaster and a turning point in Chicago’s development.

These works examine the fire, the city’s reconstruction, and the economic, political, environmental,

and social changes that shaped modern Chicago.

SOURCE 01

Berg, Scott W. The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul.

Pantheon Books, 2023.

Berg reconstructs the October 1871 fire while placing equal weight on what happened after the

flames disappeared. He follows municipal leaders, business interests, immigrants, relief workers,

and journalists to show that rebuilding was also a struggle over who would control the city. The

book is especially useful for understanding how disaster, public policy, and civic identity became

intertwined. Because Berg draws on contemporary accounts as well as later historical research, the

work provides a strong narrative foundation for a study of the fire and its political and social

consequences.

SOURCE 02

Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W. W. Norton & Company,

1991.

Cronon places Chicago within the larger environmental and economic system of the

nineteenth-century Midwest. Rather than treating the city as an isolated urban success story, he

connects its growth to railroads, grain, lumber, meatpacking, and the movement of natural

resources between Chicago and the surrounding region. This broader perspective helps explain why

rebuilding after the fire mattered beyond the city itself. The book is valuable for showing the

economic geography behind Chicago’s rapid expansion and for giving historical context to the

physical and commercial changes that followed the disaster.

SOURCE 03

Miller, Donald L. City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. Simon &

Schuster, 1996.

Miller presents Chicago’s nineteenth-century development as a combination of rapid industrial

growth, immigration, transportation expansion, political conflict, and architectural change. His

treatment of the Great Fire places the disaster within a much longer story of urban transformation

rather than presenting it as an isolated event. The book is useful when comparing conditions before

and after 1871 because it traces the city’s growth into a national commercial center. Its wide

chronological scope also makes it useful for connecting the rebuilding period to later developments

in labor, business, architecture, and civic life.

CHICAGO • NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Annotated bibliography

SOURCE 04

Pacyga, Dominic A. Chicago: A Biography. University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Pacyga offers a city-wide history that gives substantial attention to ordinary Chicagoans as well as

political leaders, industrialists, and reformers. His account helps place the Great Fire and its

aftermath within the experiences of workers, immigrant communities, neighborhood residents, and

business owners. That attention to everyday life is important because reconstruction affected

housing, employment, community boundaries, and access to political power. For research on the

fire’s long-term impact, this book provides a useful social-history perspective and helps balance

accounts that focus primarily on architecture, commerce, or elite decision-making.

SOURCE 05

Smith, Carl. Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American

City. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.

Smith combines the history of the 1871 catastrophe with an examination of memory, representation,

and recovery. He uses accounts from people who experienced the fire to show how the event was

interpreted in its own time, while also examining the rebuilding that reshaped Chicago. The work is

particularly useful for separating documented events from stories that became attached to the

disaster over time. As a historian of Chicago and a Northwestern University emeritus professor of

English and American Studies and History, Smith brings relevant expertise to a study of the fire, its

aftermath, and its place in American urban history.

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