“Andrew Diamond’s wide-ranging and significant book movingly tells the history of Chicago, how it has become a tale of two cities, from the shimmering and branded opulence of the Loop to the poverty-filled and underserved streets of the South Side. Chicago on the Make takes the story into the twenty-first century, chronicling Chicago’s deeply entrenched social and urban problems as the city ascended to the national stage during the Obama years. Diamond demonstrates how the grassroots politics of race crippled progressive forces and enabled an alliance of downtown business interests to promote a neoliberal agenda that created stark inequalities. Reinterpreting the familiar narrative that Chicago’s autocratic machine politics shaped its institutions and public life, Andrew J. Chicago on the Make traces the evolution of the city’s politics, culture, and economy as it grew from an unruly tangle of rail yards, slaughterhouses, factories, tenement houses, and fiercely defended ethnic neighborhoods into a truly global urban center. And, yet, few historians have attempted big-picture narratives of the city’s transformation over the twentieth century. Heralded as America’s quintessentially modern city, Chicago has attracted the gaze of journalists, novelists, essayists, and scholars as much as any city in the nation.
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