Ann Durkin Keating – författare

'Which neighborhood?' It's one of the first questions you're asked when you move to Chicago. And the answer you give - be it Bucktown, Bronzeville, or Bridgeport - can give your inquisitor a pretty good idea of who you are, especially in a metropolis with 230 very different neighborhoods and suburbs to choose from.Many of us, in fact, know little of the neighborhoods beyond those where we work, play, and live. This is especially true in Chicagoland, a region that spans over 4,400 square miles and is home to more than 9.5 million residents. In "Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs", historian Ann Durkin Keating sheds new light on twenty-first-century Chicago by providing a captivating yet compact guide to the Midwest's largest city. Keating charts Chicago's evolution with comprehensive, cross-referenced entries on all seventy-seven community areas, along with many suburbs and neighborhoods both extant and long forgotten, from Albany Park to Zion.Thoughtful interpretive essays by urban historians Michael Ebner, Henry Binford, Janice Reiff, Susan Hirsch, and Robert Bruegmann explore how the city's communities have changed and grown throughout the years, and sixty historic and contemporary photographs and additional maps add depth to each entry.From the South Side to the West Side to the North Side, just about every local knows how distinctive Chicago's neighborhoods are. Few of us, however, know exactly how they came to be. "Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs" brings the city - its inimitable neighborhoods, industries, and individuals - to life, making it the perfect guidebook or gift for anyone with an interest in Chicago and its history.

When Juliette Kinzie first visited Chicago in 1831, it was anything but a city. An outpost in the shadow of Fort Dearborn, it had no streets, no sidewalks, no schools, no river-spanning bridges. And with two hundred disconnected residents, it lacked any sense of community. In the decades that followed, not only did Juliette witness the city’s transition from Indian country to industrial center, but she was instrumental in its development.Juliette is one of Chicago’s forgotten founders. Early Chicago is often presented as “a man’s city,” but women like Juliette worked to create an urban and urbane world, often within their own parlors. With The World of Juliette Kinzie, we finally get to experience the rise of Chicago from the view of one of its most important founding mothers.Ann Durkin Keating, one of the foremost experts on nineteenth-century Chicago, offers a moving portrait of a trailblazing and complicated woman. Keating takes us to the corner of Cass and Michigan (now Wabash and Hubbard), Juliette’s home base. Through Juliette’s eyes, our understanding of early Chicago expands from a city of boosters and speculators to include the world that women created in and between households. We see the development of Chicago society, first inspired by cities in the East and later coming into its own midwestern ways. We also see the city become a community, as it developed its intertwined religious, social, educational, and cultural institutions. Keating draws on a wealth of sources, including hundreds of Juliette’s personal letters, allowing Juliette to tell much of her story in her own words.Juliette’s death in 1870, just a year before the infamous fire, seemed almost prescient. She left her beloved Chicago right before the physical city as she knew it vanished in flames. But now her history lives on. The World of Juliette Kinzie offers a new perspective on Chicago’s past and is a fitting tribute to one of the first women historians in the United States.

In August 1812, under threat from the Potawatomi, Captain Nathan Heald began the evacuation of ninety-four people from the isolated outpost of Fort Dearborn to Fort Wayne, hundreds of miles away. The group included several dozen soldiers, as well as nine women and eighteen children. After traveling only a mile and a half, they were attacked by five hundred Potawatomi warriors. In under an hour, fifty-two members of Heald's party were killed, and the rest were taken prisoner; the Potawatomi then burned Fort Dearborn before returning to their villages.These events are now seen as a foundational moment in Chicago's storied past. With Rising up from Indian Country, noted historian Ann Durkin Keating richly recounts the Battle of Fort Dearborn while situating it within the context of several wider histories that span the nearly four decades between the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, in which Native Americans gave up a square mile at the mouth of the Chicago River, and the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, in which the American government and the Potawatomi exchanged five million acres of land west of the Mississippi River for a tract of the same size in northeast Illinois and southeast Wisconsin. In the first book devoted entirely to this crucial period, Keating tells a story not only of military conquest but of the lives of people on all sides of the conflict. She highlights such figures as Jean Baptiste Point de Sable and John Kinzie and demonstrates that early Chicago was a place of cross-cultural reliance among the French, the Americans, and the Native Americans. Published to commemorate the bicentennial of the Battle of Fort Dearborn, this gripping account of the birth of Chicago will become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the city and its complex origins.

The modern suburbanite lives among manicured lawns, shopping centers, and public schools with private school reputations. Socially and economically dependent on the city, but autonomously governed, suburban life ostensibly offers the best of both worlds. In Building Chicago, Ann Durkin Keating offers a fascinating account of the birth and growth of Chicago's suburbs, the governments that developed to service them, and the ideas that guided early urban development.Chicago's rapid growth in the mid-nineteenth century was countered by cholera outbreaks, swampy roads, and poor living conditions. With the advent of rail transportation, city workers began to flock to burgeoning settlements outlying the city center. Various types of suburbs emerged, some as ethnic enclaves, others based on social and economic class. As they expanded, so did the need for schools, fire and police departments, water and sewer systems, and consequently, government. In the nineteenth century, nascent Cook County suburbs had just two options for government: the urban charter or the rural township.  Beginning in the 1860s, the Illinois state legislature allowed rural townships, as well as distinct settlements beyond Chicago, to add to their local powers through incorporation.  Hybrids of rural and urban forms resulted in the first suburban governments. The incorporated townships, which ringed Chicago by the early 1880s, had a diverse range of constituents and proved unsuccessful as a suburban form.  They were largely annexed to Chicago in 1889. The incorporated village emerged as the basic form of suburban government that would flourish in the twentieth century.With precision and striking detail, Keating documents the progress and failure of suburbs under their chosen governments and argues that Chicago, as a case study, is representative of the suburban landscapes of major metropolitan areas across the country.  In its first paperback edition, Building Chicago includes a comprehensive photographic essay by the author.