Read the full book review at Third Coast Review.
A little more than a century ago, in one of the world’s largest cities, Chicagoans lived a lot closer to nature than we do today—as in closer to animals, their smells, and their manure and urine.
Consider that, in 1918, some 2,000 dairy cows were being milked each morning in the city. A bit earlier, in 1900, you could wander around the city’s neighborhoods and find 5,000.
And it wasn’t only cows. Chicagoans also kept pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, geese, and rabbits, as Katherine Macica reports in “Animals at Work in Industrial Chicago,” one of 19 essays in City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History, edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan, Ann Durkin Keating, and William C. Barnett.
