Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837-1920

Risky city. This was Chicago during an unprecedented period of rapid growth: a burgeoning metropolis that quickly became a "concentration of risk." The many thousands of immigrants and rural Americans who streamed into the city during these years found it far more congested, crowded, dangerous, unpleasant, immoral, and unhealthy than they had anticipated. Challenging Chicago reveals the survival strategies to which the many people who flocked to the city resorted, especially those of the lower and middle classes for whom urban life was a new experience.