Chicago: City of the Future (Chicago)

Chicago was once seen as a science-fictional place. In the late nineteenth century, travelers—including H.G. Wells himself—saw the city as an emblem of the future. The Dubai or Shenzhen of the Gilded Age, Chicago represented hallucinatory growth, “a wilderness of skyscrapers,” world-famous stench and vast factories. Embodying modernity in its nakedness, it became commonplace to say that the coming century belonged to Chicago. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, Chicago’s grip on the future loosened. The Midwest Metropolis became somewhere a New Yorker writer could famously dismiss as “the second city,” a place whose “bid for grandeur has failed.” In a post-industrial age, Chicago’s factories fell into decline, with little appearing to replace them. Yet this, too, gave the city historical significance, and even a glimpse into the future: Chicago was one of the first cities to experience deindustrialization and a post-industrial political economy. How did Chicago’s volatile history shape its residents’ lives? How did it influence their dreams, their intimate and public worlds, and their visions of what the city was and could become?

In this class, we will examine how Chicagoans experienced and reshaped the city’s history by studying its culture. From literature to art, architecture to music, film to ideas, Chicago’s creative work gave the world enduring portraits of the dystopian shock and utopian thrill of the modern city. We will begin by examining Chicago’s formative history, reading selections from William Cronon’s classic study, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Next, we will explore the city’s history chronologically through a wide array of cultural works. We’ll read Chicago literature, from Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929) to Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca (1968), and Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street (1984). We’ll reflect on Chicago art and architecture, from architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to the Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe, painters Grant Wood and Archibald Motley to photographers Vivian Maier and Terry Evans. We’ll watch a rarely seen film from Chicago’s Black Power era, 1973’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, and dig into Chicago music history, from blues and jazz to 1980s house. Throughout, we’ll ask what defines Chicago art and culture, debate how it illuminates the city’s history, and search for patterns and themes across some of the city’s most powerful art.

Course Schedule

Monday, 6:30-9:30pm CT
September 14 — October 05, 2026
4 weeks

$355.00

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