In just 60 years Chicago grew from a remote, swampy frontier town into one of the most explosively alive cities in the world. Captains of industry built empires through innovation, ingenuity, determination, and sheer ruthlessness, while the labor of millions of working men and women -- most of them immigrants from Ireland and Northern Europe -- helped reinvent the way America did business.
Chicago's location at the end of a canal linking the Mississippi to New York makes it attractive to Yankee speculators as well as Irish laborers. In just a few decades, the remote fur trading post explodes into the metropolis of the West. Not even the great fire of 1871 can slow the city's development.
From the railroads to Marshall Field's department store to Cyrus McCormick's reaper factory to the stockyards, workers struggle for their share of a new industrial capitalism. The Haymarket Affair becomes the most sensational labor incident of the 19th century.
Chicago develops the world's first skyscraper downtown, with a unique American architectural style. In its shadows are gambling, prostitution, corruption, poverty, and disease. In 1893 Chicago's business elite hosts a World's Fair, proudly showing 27 million visitors a glistening, sanitized city of the future.
