Chicago
is the largest city in the U.S. state of Illinois and the Midwestern
United States, as well as the third-most populous city in the
United States with more than 2.8 million residents. Adjacent
to Lake Michigan, the Chicago metropolitan area (commonly referred
to as Chicagoland) has a population of more than 9.5 million
people in three U.S. states, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana,
and was the third largest U.S. metropolitan area in 2000.
One of the largest cities in North America, Chicago is among
the world's twenty-five largest urban areas by population,
and rated an alpha world city by the World Cities Study Group
at Loughborough University.
Chicago incorporated as a city in 1837 after
being founded in 1833 near a portage between the Great Lakes
and the Mississippi River watershed. The city soon became a
major transportation hub in North America and the transportation,
financial and industrial center of the Midwest. Today the city's
attractions bring 44.2 million visitors annually. O'Hare
International is the second busiest airport in the world. The
city has a notable and famous political culture,[citation needed]
is a stronghold of the Democratic Party, and has been home
to numerous influential politicians, including the first African-American
President of the United States, Barack Obama. Chicago has also
been chosen as one of the final 4 candidates to host the 2016
Summer Olympics, and the only American city still in the running.
Chicago is often called the "Windy City", "Chi-Town", "Second
City," and the "City of Big Shoulders".
First Settlers
During the
mid-18th century the area was inhabited by a native American
tribe known as the Potawatomis, who had taken the place of
the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples. The first permanent settler
in Chicago, Haitian Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, arrived
in the 1770s, married a Potawatomi woman, and founded the area’s
first trading post. In 1803 the United States Army built Fort
Dearborn, which was destroyed in the 1812 Fort Dearborn massacre.
The Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi later ceded the land to
the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. On August
12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population
of 350. Within seven years it grew to a population of over
4,000. The City of Chicago was incorporated on March 4, 1837.
The name "Chicago" is
the French rendering of the Miami-Illinois name shikaakwa,
meaning “wild leek.”The sound shikaakwa
in Miami-Illinois literally means 'striped skunk', and was
a reference to wild leek, or the smell of onions. The name
initially applied to the river, but later came to denote the
site of the city. |