Description
Book SynopsisPacyga guides readers through the history of Chicago's Union Stock Yard as only an insider can, covering the rough and toxic life inside the plants and their lasting effects on the world outside.
Trade Review"For many people Henry Ford's 1913 Detroit assembly line is a symbol of technological triumph. This book shows that Chicago's 1865 disassembly line was an earlier more complete wonder, rapidly transporting animals, keeping them healthy and watered, dividing them into a wide variety of of products, communicating ownership and destination, and keeping meticulous accounts of all the processes. The speed and dexterity were put on display, proudly exploiting labor, advertising efficiency, making Chicago incredibly wealthy. This is a stunning account of the growth, complexity, rewards, and costs of modernity."--Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg "Pacyga has taken as his subject a single square mile, a small patch of urban land on the south side of Chicago, and has told an epic story--the rise of the Union Stockyards and Packingtown, their heyday as a great industrial complex and engine of modern America, their precipitous decline after World War II and their unexpected recent resurgence as a site of new industrial possibilities. It is a big story of rapid, and frequently unsettling, economic, technological, and social change, and Pacyga has told it in a vivid and compelling way."--Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago Winner--2016 "Illinois State Historical Society's Russell P. Strange Book of the Year " "Pacyga has written an intimate, elegant, fascinating, and informative story of one of America's greatest industrial complexes. As Pacyga shows, the dismal, exploitative, vibrant, and contested histories of the stockyards and the meatpacking factories are illustrative of both the fractured dynamics of American industrial capitalism and the rise and fall of the great industrial city of Chicago. Slaughterhouse is vital reading for all concerned with urban, industrial, and social history."--Robert Lewis, author of Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis "Pacyga is the great bard of Chicago-historian, raconteur, social critic. Slaughterhouse is a critically important book about one of the city's epic neighborhoods."--Robert Slayton, author of Back of the Yards
