Chicago

History

The first Europeans to arrive at the site of present-day Chicago were French explorer Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette in 1673. Over a century later, in 1783, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable became the first permanent resident of European descent in the area when he established a fur-trading post there. Early in its history, the settlement endured the massacre of 53 Americans when 500 Potawatomi warriors stormed Fort Dearborn, which had been built to protect the settlers, during the War of 1812. (The fort was rebuilt by 1816.) The first major spur to the growth of the town was the building of the Illinois & Michigan Canal linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River basin. Planned in 1830, the canal wasn't completed until 1848, although a speculative land boom was already underway in the 1830s, and the population surged upward. The city was incorporated and held its first mayoral election in 1837.

By 1848, when the canal was completed, the first railroad arrived in the city, and Chicago became the rail hub of the growing nation and a marketing center for farm produce and livestock, as well as the center of the meatpacking industry and home to the country's first financial exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade. By mid-century, the arrival of Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants was providing a labor force to spur the growth in industry, and the Irish established one of the city's first ethnic communities in Bridgeport. The city's population grew from 4,470 in 1840 to 28,000 in 1850, and then to 110,000 by the following decade. By 1890 it passed the one-million mark to become the nation's second-largest metropolis after New York.

In 1860 Chicago hosted the Republican Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency, and the city played a vital role in the Civil War by serving as the primary supplier of beef to the Union soldiers. In the postwar era, Chicago became the country's major lumber market as well as its grain-handling capital, as well as a manufacturing center for farm machinery. While the city's upper classes enjoyed unprecedented wealth, its thousands of working-class residents suffered the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions common to the urban poor of the industrial age. Jane Addams's Hull House became famous for its efforts to improve conditions for immigrant tenement dwellers on the city's West Side. Eventually sanitary conditions became so lethal that the course of the Chicago River was reversed at the turn of the century to keep its sewage-and industrial waste-laden waters from further polluting Lake Michigan and to end recurring outbreaks of waterborne infectious diseases.

Although the Great Fire of October 8, 1871, devastated the city, killing between 250 and 300 people and destroying more than 17,000 buildings, Chicago's economic base—its stockyards, freight yards, and industrial area—were spared, enabling the city to rebuild rapidly. Much of the city was restored within a year, and Chicago continued to grow. In 1893, in the face of a nationwide economic depression, the city hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, which attracted some 21 million visitors. The 1890s was also the decade when Chicago became famous as the home of a new form of architecture that was to transform America's urban landscape—the skyscraper. During this period, the city's wealth also financed the creation of major cultural institutions such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Art Institute.

By the late nineteenth century, Chicago was already notorious for its political corruption, and reform efforts were implemented by the 1890s. However, the city reputation as the vice capital of the nation was renewed with the rise of mobsters Al Capone, John Dillinger, and their cohorts in the 1920s and 1930s. Chicagoans suffered keenly from the Great Depression but, like other areas of the country, recovered during World War II (1939–1945), becoming one of the nation's top centers for defense-related production, as well as the site of its first controlled nuclear reaction, overseen by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago in 1942.

A major development of the post-war era has been the suburbanization of the city, whose population, which accounted for roughly two-thirds of the metropolitan area in 1950, shrank to only one-third by 1990, and Los Angeles replaced Chicago as the nation's second most populous city. Chicago's racial balance has also changed during this period, with blacks becoming the major ethnic group in an increasingly segregated city, and suburban sprawl has replaced formerly populated areas in the heart of the city with teeming expressways.

The first postwar decades were the Daley era (1955–1976), when Mayor Richard J. Daley oversaw a period of robust expansion and modernization that included the construction of O'Hare International Airport and the world's tallest building, the Sears Tower. However, it was also during the Daley years that the disturbances at the 1968 Democratic convention etched themselves indelibly on the consciousness of the nation. Since then Chicago has had a woman mayor (Jane Byrne, 1979–1983) and its first black mayor (Harold Washington, 1983–1987), as well as its first female black senator (Carol Moseley-Braun, 1992–). The Daley name regained its prominence in city politics in the 1990s with the election of Richard M. Daley to the post of mayor.