Up from the prairie: Depictions of Chicago and the Middle West in popular culture, 1865--1983.

摘要

Building upon the work of scholars who have explained the growth of Chicago in terms of the economy, politics, population, and geography of the Middle West, this dissertation analyzes the influence of regional imagery and landscape on the city's development. Recognizing that Americans identified specific characteristics with particular places, journalists and other popular writers relied upon regional icons of the Middle West, the West, frontier, prairie, heartland, and rustbelt to demystify the metropolis and to explain to their readers why, where, and how Chicago had grown. Their depictions often carried gendered and racialized images---of fertile fields, yeoman farmers, or broad-shouldered laborers. Such portrayals revealed the interplay between notions of place and contemporary assumptions about sexual, racial, and class identity. The regional imagery in these characterizations demonstrated that location too influenced Americans' reactions to industrialization and urbanization. Images and events common to all cities seemed to take on distinctive attributes when viewed through a regional lens; Americans' assumptions about conditions in the Midwest shaped their characterizations of the midwestern metropolis.;Depictions of Chicago's "reputation" not only provided interesting fodder for guidebooks, magazine articles, songs, novels, paintings, poetry, and booster pamphlets. These regionalized images also shaped the growth of Chicago, by alternatively serving or hindering the city in its competition with other urban areas for investment, labor, and tourists. Portrayals of the city, even those created by outsiders, also affected how Chicagoans saw themselves and their city, and thus shaped their sense of community. Their rejection or embrace of regulations on development, their assumptions about the "best" use of certain neighborhoods, and their attitudes about who "belonged" where all reflected the influences of their city's "character." Who felt as if they had a stake and a civic responsibility, and who felt alienated? Finally, by linking critiques of America's rural and urban societies, characterizations of the midwestern metropolis shaped conceptions of national identity. Visions of "typical" American qualities emerged from this blending of urban and rural, wild and pastoral that seemed to occur most clearly in the midwestern metropolis, where city met country.