Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell

Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. The Illinois and Michigan Canal took twelve years to build, dug almost entirely by hand, mostly by Irish immigrants, who crossed an ocean and the prairie for the privilege of keeling over with a shovel in their hands. They did not die in vain. The canal worked pretty much exactly as Joliet imagined. So much trade moved past this corner that Chicago expanded from a muddy little hamlet of a few hundred people to city of over a hundred thousand in just twenty-five years.
    Thanks in part to one particular innovation born next to the Michigan Avenue Bridge, Chicago was not the only city in America to experiencea population boom in the last half of the nineteenth century. Cyrus McCormick built his McCormick Reaper Works right here on the river in 1847. His machine, the reaper, turned out to be one of the most significant inventions in the history of history. Before McCormick it took three hours to gather a bushel of wheat, and with the reaper it took ten minutes.
    Because McCormick helped mechanize agriculture, farms could use less labor in less time and produce more crops on more land. By speeding up and emptying out the country, McCormick populated the city. Not that the march of progress is necessarily benign, especially if you’re one of those urban workers—just ask the dead of the Haymarket riot who laid down their lives just fifteen blocks from here for the eight-hour workday, or read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle about what the meatpackers went through on the South Side, or listen to the words of Cyrus McCormick himself, who, along with merchant Marshall Field, secretly bought Gatling guns for the Illinois National Guard in case of “what danger, if any, was to be anticipated from the communistic element of the city.”
    By the Civil War, most of America’s grain from the West and the vast prairie around Chicago was unloaded from trains here, traded on the commodities exchange, and then sent east on ships from Lake Michigan, all within a five-minute walk of the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive. It could have been this very spot the poet Carl Sandburg was thinking of in his famous poem “Chicago.” He called the city “Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’sFreight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.” The reaper works on the north side of the river was the Tool Maker. The Stacker of Wheat was in the giant grain silos on the south side of the river where the giant Hyatt Hotel stands. The Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler was over on the train tracks next to the silos. And you can spot the big shoulders attached to roughly nine out of ten men walking by.
    It is my project to tell the whole history of America from this corner, and there’s no telling of that history without the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president here in Chicago at the Republican National Convention in 1860, on the very site, by the way, of the old Sauganash Hotel where the Indians and drunken ladies used to dance.
    And the Chicago Tribune Tower, standing on North Michigan Avenue a stone’s throw from the bridge, not only campaigned for Lincoln, its editors talked him into running for president in the first place. Lincoln was considering going for vice president. Maybe.
    As a subscriber who reads the Trib every morning, it is difficult for me to get all misty-eyed with idealism over the paper’s current state. Let’s just say I identified with the guy I saw not long ago on Michigan Avenue, at the height of the Age of Lewinsky, grab a Tribune vending machine and wrest it from its moorings in the sidewalk, slamming it to the ground. But the Tribune ’s heroic past is another story. Every time I’m about to cancel my subscription just to save myself from recycling, I remember that Abe Lincoln subscribed, and throw yet another fat Sunday edition on top of the