Chicago on the Make is the product of more than two decades of work on a city that has never ceased to amaze me, for better or for worse. I started that time as a resident of Chicago, a young graduate student from the University of Michigan embarking on a dissertation about race and housing, and ended it in Paris as a professor of American history and civilization at the Sorbonne. I lived between two continents and passed through several institutions, accumulating numerous debts of various kinds along the way.
In the early years in Ann Arbor and Chicago, a number of people supported me both intellectually and spiritually during some times when I doubted my capacity and resolve to move forward with my research. Terry McDonald, Earl Lewis, and George Sanchez served as excellent mentors, and a number of friends in and around the graduate program in history in Ann Arbor nurtured my thinking at the outset: Chris Schmidt-Nowara, who sadly and tragically left us in 2015, John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, Riyad Koya, Steve Soper, Susan Rosenbaum, and Greg Shaya, among others. Once in Chicago, the big city for a kid from the suburbs of Boston, I was fortunate enough to have fallen in with a tight group of generous, witty, fun, and exceptionally perceptive Chicagoans that showed me another side of the city and sparked my passion for telling its stories: Edward Koziboski, Kathy Flynn, Dan Kiss, Jayson Harsin, Kevin Carollo, Lyle Rowen, Meg Zimbeck, Roshen Hendrickson, and Friese Undine. As I was conducting the research for my first book, Mean Streets, parts of which have been incorporated in various ways into Chicago on the Make, a number of scholars shared their work, read my work, or just took the time to talk with me. In particular, I am indebted to Timothy Gilfoyle, James Grossman, George Chauncey, David Roediger, Gabriela Arredondo, Chad Heap, James Barrett, Sudhir Venkatesh, Gerald Suttles, William Sites, Dominic Pacyga, and Ramon Gutiérrez.
Many of the people mentioned above continued to accompany me during the next phase, when my life moved across the Atlantic and I began to approach Chicago’s history from the angle that led me to Chicago on the Make. In France, a number of colleagues at the Université Lille 3, the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris, and more recently at the Université Paris-Sorbonne contributed in a range of ways to my work and general well-being: Thomas Dutoit, Richard Davis, Mathieu Duplay, Alexandra Poulain, Philippe Vervaecke, Angeline Escafré-Dublet, Romain Bertrand, Hélène Combes, Denis Lacorne, Christian Lequesne, Nathalie Caron, Yves Figueiredo, Thibaut Clément, Olivier Frayssé, Marc Amfreville, Juliette Utard, Claire Charlot, Joana Etchart, and Elisabeth Angel-Perez.
As I was in the process of writing Chicago on the Make, I was fortunate to have had numerous opportunities to bounce my ideas off some brilliant scholars during seminars and conferences, or merely over dinner or coffee. Invited talks at the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC), DePaul University’s Department of History, the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the NYU Urban Seminar at New York University, and the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre provided me with new and timely insights. Special thanks are owed to Teresa Córdova, Director of UIC’s Great Cities Institute, for setting up the event that allowed me to exchange with Don Rose and Jesús “Chuy” García. I am also grateful to a number of scholars and others in the United States and France who shared their ideas with me as I was completing the manuscript: Mary Pattillo, Timothy Stewart-Winter, Donna Murch, N.D.B. Connolly, Kim Phillips-Fein, Thomas Jessen Adams, Sylvie Tissot, Adam Green, Michael Dawson, Pauline Lipman, Romain Huret, Emmanuel Blanchard, Sarah Leboime, Clément Petitjean, George Katito, Laurence Gervais, David Farber, Paul Schor, Jonathan Magidoff, Robert Self, Michael Foley, Sébastien Chauvin, François Weil, Nancy Green, Vincent Michelot, Julien Talpin, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Marie-Hélène Bacqué, Jean-Baptiste Velut, Jeff Chang, David Huyssen, Salah Amokrane, and Frédéric Callens. My work has also benefited enormously from the fresh perspectives that my students in my master’s seminars have brought to me over my past five years at the Sorbonne.
Four people, in particular, deserve my very deepest gratitude for having read most or much of the manuscript and for having offered suggestions that helped me to greatly improve it: Thomas Sugrue, Caroline Rolland-Diamond, Bryant Simon, and Elsa Devienne. While Bryant came in towards the tail end, Tom, Caroline, and Elsa helped to keep me believing in the project from its earliest days.
No small amount of institutional support helped make this book possible. I would like to thank the École Doctorale IV, the Commission de la recherche, and the research center Histoire et Dynamique des Espaces Anglophones (HDEA) of the Université Paris-Sorbonne, as well as the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris for their generous financial assistance. I would also like to extend a heartfelt thanks to the staffs at the Chicago History Museum and UIC Special Collections and University Archives, as well as to the administrative staffs of the UFR Études Anglophones and the École Doctorale IV at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. I am moreover very grateful to my editor, Niels Hooper, at the University of California Press for his unwavering support through the long years it took to bring Chicago on the Make to fruition.
Finally, this book would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of the people who have surrounded me closest of all over these past years—my dear friends from my neighborhood and my family. Alice, Fabrice, Julien, Charlotte, Joséphine, Marc, Johanna, Anouchka, and Guillaume, thanks for making a community out of my neighborhood. To Caroline, Clyde, and Théodore, my gratitude is endless.