Sensing Chicago

How did Chicagoans smell, taste, feel, hear, and see their city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Answering this question is Adam Mack's objective in Sensing Chicago, an addition to the growing literature on the history of the senses. His thesis is that “elites” used their five senses “as barometers of civic health and social distinction” (p. 2). To demonstrate his point, Mack takes readers on a tour, documenting how privileged citizens sensed some of the city's signal events and places. He begins with the Chicago River, a slow-moving open sewer that provided important economic services to city industrialists. Noxious odors and foul-tasting drinking water hinted at serious trouble in the noses and on the tongues of the powerful, prompting them to advocate for radical and expensive engineering solutions. Mack then moves to the 1871 Chicago fire, which he says completely overloaded all fives senses of middle-class people and erased important markers of social distinction, prompting anxiety and efforts to reassert order. Next, he shows how the loud voices of labor activists forebode class warfare in the ears of industrialists such as George Pullman, who responded by trying to refine the supposed coarse sensibilities of immigrant workers

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Class (philosophy · Epistemology · George (robot · Immigration · Media studies · Order (exchange · Point (geometry · Sociology · Taste · History · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology

• Sensing Disorder

  Julia C Frankenbach•Labour / Le Travail•2016

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