Outward Bound

Abstract

Bankruptcy court records contain gold mines of information on the workings of businesses. Companies seeking protections under federal bankruptcy laws had to submit internal documents confirming their assets, revenues, expenses, and debts and credits due. With archived lists of creditors and debtors, scholars digging into the records can reconstruct chains of suppliers and purchasers of goods and services; if workers or governments registered claims with the courts, aspects of labor and community relations can be revealed as well.1 The deposed papers sitting in boxes in regional warehouses of the National Archives and Records Administration are voluminous and daunting, a reason perhaps why greater numbers of historians have not tapped them. If scholars need convincing of the richness of the records (and their potential for innovative use), a reading of Robert Lewis’s Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis is highly recommended. The book also bares certain drawbacks to relying on them almost exclusively. Lewis’s book addresses two literatures in industrial history studies. The first involves the geographical location of manufacturing companies and, specifically, their clustering in city centers. The second concerns the interfirm nexuses within which manufacturers operated and, specifically, the salience of networks. Chicago serves for Lewis’s investigations. Chicago now is likely firstrather than second-city, in terms of scholarly attention. For more than a hundred years, social surveyors and historians have fixed on the city to examine social stratification, residential patterning, racial and ethnic divides and hostilities, labor organizing and conflict, living and working conditions, reform movements, the built (and rebuilt) environment, urban planning, ward politics in its classic dimensions, and regionalism. Weariness and wariness are understandable responses to the prospects of yet another book on Chicago, but Lewis’s Chicago Made, rest assured, contributes uniquely to the brimming historiography. For example, proprietorships, diversified manufacture, and specialization are now considered the hallmarks of such industrial cities as