Download The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream AudioBook Free
A cultural background of Chicago at midcentury, using its incredible mix of architects, politicians, music artists, writers, business people, and celebrities who helped shape modern America Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of NY and Los Angeles, much of what defined the country as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before flights 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 your end of World Warfare II and 1960, Mies truck der Rohe's glass-and-steel architecture became the facial skin of commercial America, Ray Kroc's McDonald's improved how people eat, Hugh Hefner unveiled Playboy, and the Chess brothers supercharged rock and roll with Chuck Berry. On the School of Chicago, the atom was separated and American civilization was packed into the Great Books. Yet even as Chicago led just how in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back their own distinct voices. In books, it was the outlaw novels of Nelson Algren (then having on a separate affair with Simone de Beauvoir), the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel's dental 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 set, and the improvisational humor troupe Second City whose famous alumni are now all over the place in American entertainment. Despite this diversity, racial divisions educated virtually every aspect of life in Chicago. The chaos - both constructive and harmful - of this period was establish into action by the second migration north of African Us citizens during World Warfare II. As whites either fled to the suburbs or violently opposed integration, urban organizers tried to create away "blight" with assignments that marred a generation of American places. The election of Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955 launched a frenzy of new building that arrived at an awful cost - monolithic real estate assignments for the black community and a fresh kind of self-satisfied provincialism that increased the end of Chicago's role as America's conference place. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the storyline of metropolis in its postwar best and explains its profound impact on modern America.
