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D. Bradford Hunt, Andrew J. Diamond. Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City., The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 3, June 2019, Pages 1097–1098, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz396
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Andrew J. Diamond offers an ambitious synthesis in Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City. He strives for a “people’s history of Chicago” in the twentieth century and to “integrate the bottom up and the top down, to combine total history and microhistory, to bring the political, social, cultural, and economic into the same frame” (5). This methodological utopia is not reached and is perhaps unattainable. More modestly, Diamond has written a history of the clash between progressive politics and strong mayors in Chicago’s twentieth century. The book is animated by the author’s frustration with a city that remains deeply divided and unequal, described as “two Chicagos,” one largely white and thriving, the other largely black and Latino and struggling (7). This outcome, Diamond argues, was not driven by larger economic forces but by politicians with neoliberal agendas who used the politics of race to manipulate the electorate and reshape the city’s political culture in ways that created profound inequalities.
