Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: "Chicago is America's Dream, Writ Large": Forging the Suburban Dream in Early Chicago -- 1. "Vast and Sudden Municipality": Boosting and Lamenting Chicago's Growth -- 2. "Domestic and Respectable": Property-Owner Politics after the Great Chicago Fire -- 3. Lake and Jungle: The Assembly-line Factory as a Force for Suburbanization -- 4. "Better than a Bank for a Poor Man": Worker's Strategies for Home Financing -- 5. Mapping Chicago, Imagining Metropolises: Reconsidering the Zonal Model of Urban Growth -- 6. The Mortgages of Whiteness: Chicago's Race Riots of 1919 -- Conclusion: The City of the Twentieth Century -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

"Between the 1860s and 1920s, Chicago's working-class immigrants designed the American dream of home-ownership. They imagined homes as small businesses, homes that were simultaneously a consumer-oriented respite from work and a productive space that workers hoped to control. Leapfrogging out of town along with Chicago's assembly-line factories, Chicago's early suburbs were remarkably diverse. These suburbs were marketed with the elusive promise that homeownership might offer some bulwark against the vicissitudes of industrial capitalism, that homes might be "better than a bank for a poor man," in the words of one evocative advertisement, and "the working man's reward." This promise evolved into what Lewinnek terms "the mortgages of whiteness:" the hope that property values might increase if that property could be kept white. Suburbs also developed through nineteenth-century notions of the gendered respectability of domesticity, early ideas about city planning and land economics, as well as an evolving twentieth-century discourse about the racial attributes of property values. Because Chicago presented itself as a paradigmatic American city and because numerous Chicago-based experts eventually instituted national real-estate programs, Chicago's early growth affected the growth of twentieth-century America. Framed by two working-class riots against suburbanization in 1872 and 1919, spurred from both above and below, this work shows how Chicagoans helped form America's urban sprawl and examines the roots of America's suburbanization, synthesizing the new suburban history into the diversity of America's suburbs"--