![The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream](https://d3525k1ryd2155.cloudfront.net/f/326/204/9781594204326.RH.0.l.jpg)
The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream Hardcover - 2013
by Thomas Dyja
- Used
- Hardcover
Description
Standard delivery: 3 to 10 days
Details
- Title The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition First Edition
- Condition Used - Good
- Pages 508
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Penguin Press, New York
- Date 2013-04-18
- Illustrated Yes
- Bookseller's Inventory # Z-003-2356
- ISBN 9781594204326 / 1594204322
- Weight 1.85 lbs (0.84 kg)
- Dimensions 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.8 in (23.88 x 15.75 x 4.57 cm)
- Library of Congress subjects Chicago (Ill.) - History - 20th century, Chicago (Ill.) - Intellectual life - 20th
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 2012039710
- Dewey Decimal Code 977.311
About St. Vinnie's Charitable Books Oregon, United States
St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County is a 501c3 charity based in Eugene Oregon. We serve at risk, homeless and low income populations in communities throughout Oregon. 100% of your purchase goes directly to help serve people in need by supporting our emergency homeless services, low income housing, or services for veterans, the elderly, and many other specialty programs helping those who need it most. We appreciate your business.
Summary
Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America's central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory. Between the end of World War II and 1960, Mies van der Rohe's glass and steel architecture became the face of corporate America, Ray Kroc's McDonald's changed how we eat, Hugh Hefner unveiled Playboy, and the Chess brothers supercharged rock and roll with Chuck Berry. At the University of Chicago, the atom was split and Western civilization was packaged into the Great Books.
Yet even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct voices. In literature, it was the outlaw novels of Nelson Algren (then carrying on a passionate affair with Simone de Beauvoir), the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel's oral histories. In music, it was the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the urban blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and the trippy avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra. In performance, it was the intimacy of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the Chicago School of Television, and the improvisational Second City whose famous alumni are now everywhere in American entertainment.
Despite this diversity, racial divisions informed virtually every aspect of life in Chicago. The chaosboth constructive and destructiveof this period was set into motion by the second migration north of African Americans during World War Two. As whites either fled to the suburbs or violently opposed integration, urban planners tried to design away "blight" with projects that marred a generation of American cities. The election of Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955 launched a frenzy of new building that came at a terrible costmonolithic housing projects for the black community and a new kind of self-satisfied provincialism that sped the end of Chicago's role as America's meeting place. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America.