Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers. By Adam Mack (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015) 161 pp. $85.00 cloth $25.00 paper

Urban historians and other social scientists fascinated with the growth and development of U. S. cities during the industrial age have made Chicago, reputedly the nation’s first “shock city,” one of the prime locations for investigation. Indeed, these scholars have found much in Chicago’s past that was “shocking.” Contemporaries described the Windy City of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as dirty, loud, smelly, unsightly, unsafe, vulgar, and generally repugnant. A thriving community bustling with commerce and a magnet for enterprising men and women on the make, Chicago attracted immigrants from foreign nations, New England, and the rural Midwest at a remarkable pace; the dynamic city became widely renowned as a perfect site for raw, unbridled capitalism, as well as a place desperately in need of culture and refinement. Detailed accounts of the urban environment on the shores of Lake Michigan abounded, but authors of books and articles about...