Synopsis

This three-part series draws upon the comprehensive history detailed in Donald L. Miller’s *City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America*. The final installment examines the city's simmering ethnic and class conflicts of the 1880s and 1890s. Groups of shared heritage formed bonds of mutual support, a "defensive communalism," as narrator David Ogden Stiers describes it. Yet, the majority of immigrants initially sought refuge in the Near West Side, the city’s most impoverish