Structuring Poverty in the Windy City : University Press of Kansas : 9780700628001 : 0700628002 : 30 May 2019 : The Great Chicago Fire in October 1871 destroyed 2,600 acres and left tens of thousands without housing, food, fuel, or clothing. In the aftermath the mayor handed all relief duties to the commercial elite at the Chicago Relief and Aid Society. This was, as Joel E. Black's provocative study shows, a critical decision?one that ensured that Chicago's physical rebuilding would be coupled with an equally ambitious rebuilding of the city's poor, as reformers, social scientists, and journalists set out to interpret and define Chicago's jobless, wayward, and migrating populations. What emerged from this effort was a new form of social and quasi-governmental authority based on poverty?a web of political and legal theories and practices rooted in the conditions of the poor. This authority is the subject of Structuring Poverty in the Windy City. In the decades after the Chicago Fire,