1. By Carl Sandburg

2.  Born in Galesburg, Illinois on January 6, 1878  His family was very poor; Carl left school at the age of thirteen to work odd jobs, from laying bricks to dishwashing, to help support his family. (Roots for his appreciation for hard work and the working class.)  Sandburg worked his way through Lombard College (More appreciation for hard work and the working class). While he attended for four years, he never received a diploma (he would later receive honorary degrees from Lombard, Knox College, and Northwestern University).  After college, he moved to Milwaukee, where he worked as an advertising writer and reporter.  He was a Socialist sympathizer at that point in his life, worked for the Social-Democrat Party in Wisconsin (Sympathized with the lower class and sought equality between classes in society).

3.  He and his wife moved to Chicago in 1913 where he became an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News.  He established his reputation with Chicago Poems and Cornhuskers, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.  Sandburg became known for his free verse poems that portrayed industrial America.  Spent the rest of his life on various projects, mainly a study of Abraham Lincoln. He won a second Pulitzer Prize for a biography on Lincoln and a third for a collection of poetry in 1950.  He died on July 22, 1967.

4. Chicago was only 46 years old when Mark Twain wrote those words, but it had already grown more than 100-fold, from a small trading post at the mouth of the Chicago River into one of the nation’s largest cities, and it wasn’t about to stop. Over the next 20 years, it would quadruple in population, amazing the rest of the world with its ability to repeatedly reinvent itself. Today, Chicago has become a global city, a thriving center of international trade and commerce, and a place where people of every nationality come to pursue the American dream.

5.  Incorporated as a city in 1837, Chicago was ideally situated to take advantage of the trading possibilities created by the nation’s westward expansion. The completion of the Illinois & Michigan Canal in 1848 created a water link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, but the canal was soon rendered obsolete by railroads.  As Chicago grew, its residents took heroic measures to keep pace. In the 1850s, they raised many of the streets five to eight feet to install a sewer system – and then raised the buildings, as well. Unfortunately, the buildings, streets and sidewalks were made of wood, and most of them burned to the ground in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.  The Chicago Water Tower and Pumping Station at Michigan and Chicago avenues are among the few buildings to have survived the fire.

6.  Chicago rebuilt quickly. Much of the debris was dumped into Lake Michigan as landfill, forming the underpinnings for what is now Grant Park, Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago.  In the half-century following the Great Fire, waves of immigrants came to Chicago to take jobs in the factories and meatpacking plants.  Chicago in 1900 was a financial, agricultural, manufacturing, and transportation hub for the nation.  During this boom of industrialization, immigration became lax and with the influx of people, the crime rate rose. Chicago was a site of a lot of organized crime, especially Italian Mafia; mainly bootlegging, saloons, gambling, etc. For instance, in 1919 Al Capone took root in Chicago, where his career in organized crime took off.  The city had many firsts:  The nation’s first skyscraper, the 10- story, steel-framed Home Insurance Building, was built in 1884.  When residents were threatened by waterborne illnesses from sewage flowing into Lake Michigan, they reversed the Chicago River in 1900 to make it flow toward the Mississippi. Chicago was the birthplace of: the refrigerated rail car (Swift) mail-order retailing (Sears and Montgomery Ward) the car radio (Motorola) the TV remote control (Zenith)

7.  This poem made famous the description of Chicago as the “City of the Big Shoulders,” celebrating its role at the time as the industrial capital of the United States.  This poem is a celebration of an urbanization that was fueled by industrialism and inventions like electric lights and new modes of transportation. It is also a realistic look at a city growing so fast that its population at this time was doubling every 20 years (due to industrialization).  Poem mentions how the city rebuilds under smoke, referencing the Great Fire of 1871— destroyed most of the city, but they rebuilt with courage and are thriving with strength.  The poem also makes reference to the organized crime and other aspects of the workforce during industrialization.