Review: A Long-Ago Blaze That Echoes the Pandemic, Chicago’s Great Fire, by Carl Smith
- 1986—The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth, by Christine Meisner Rosen, 408 pages—Looking at the aftermath of destructive fires in Baltimore, Boston, and Chicago, this work tracks the inadequate responses of the cities to the need for improvements in a wide range of areas including water quality, housing, fire protection, and sanitation.
- 1990—American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago, by Ross Miller, 287 pages—The aim of this book, later republished as The Great Chicago Fire, was to examine the myths surrounding the fire and how they reflect myth-making in America.
- 1995—Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874, by Karen Sawislak, 396 pages—This book examines the social, political, and class disputes over how to rebuild Chicago after the fire.
- 1995—Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman, by Carl Smith, 395 pages—The focus here is on how the fire and two other violent events shaped the way Chicagoans thought of themselves and their disorderly city and how the rest of the world did.
- 2002—The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow, by Richard F. Bales, 338 pages—Despite the myth, generations of historians have exonerated Mrs. Catherine O’Leary and her cow from starting the fire. With its painstaking research and fresh examination of the evidence, this book could have been titled Case Closed.