Cheryl Hudson

I n this engaging multicultural series, see, feel and explore the world of irresistible youngsters from different cultural backgrounds as they share people, places and things that are important to them. Music makes us happy and there are plenty of familiar tunes in this book that will make children want to sing along. Join the fun while you hum, clap or simply carry a tune in Songs I Love to Sing.

Songs I Love to Sing

"An illustrated biographical compilation of over fifty African American women from the 1700s through to the present day." --

50+ African American Women Who Changed the World

Brave. Black. First

Before the publication of Nature's Metropolis in 1991, historians generally treated urban and rural areas as distinct from one another, eact following separate lines of development and maturity. Using Chicago and its surrounding areas as a model, Cronon shows that the city-country story should be treated as a unified narrative, with each part inseparable from, and dependent on, the other. Cronon builds on Frederick Jackson Turner's nineteenth century "frontier thesis, "which stressed the effect that taming the wilderness had on the American character. He argues that nature has shaped human creativity and that capitalist market forces played the major role in changing urban and rural areas together. Book jacket.

Chicago and the Great West

Nature's Metropolis

What caused the rise of Chicago, and how did the city's expansion fuel the westward movement of the American frontier – and influence the type of society that evolved as a result? Nature's Metropolis emerged as a result of William Cronon asking and answering those questions, and the work can usefully be seen as an extended example of the critical thinking skill of problem-solving in action. Cronon navigates a path between the followers of Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the thesis that American character was shaped by the experience of the frontier, and revisionists who sought to suggest that the rugged individualism Turner depicted as a creation of life in the West was little but a fiction. For Cronon, the most productive question to ask was not whether or not men forged in the liberty-loving furnace of the Wild West had the sort of impact on America that Turner posited, but the quite different one of how capitalism and political economy had combined to drive the westward expansion of the US. For Cronon, individualism was scarcely even possible in a capitalist machine in which humans were little more than cogs, and the needs and demands of capital, not capitalists, prevailed. Nature's Metropolis, then, is a work in which the rise of Chicago is explained by generating alternative possibilities, and one that uses a rigorous study of the evidence to decide between competing solutions to the problem. It is also a fine work of interpretation, for a large part of Cronon's argument revolves around his attempt to define exactly what is rural, and what is urban, and how the two interact to create a novel economic force.

Cheryl Hudson

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