Adam Mack's Sensing Chicago, a recent edition in the Studies in Sensory History series from the University of Illinois, explores an embodied history of Chicago from the era of the Civil War until the end of progressivism during the 1920s. In five short chapters, Mack tells a social history of sensory experiences in the face of market change. The goals of recent sensory history involve describing historical experience through intersensory links, attending to sensory historicism, and applying diverse sources to interpret the embodied past. Mack reaches these objectives, often outlined by Constance Classen, Mark Smith, and David Howes, by exposing synesthesia within working-class perceptions through a phenomenological reading of newspapers, government documents, and literature.

Sensing Chicago explores a discourse about the excesses of capitalism. The entertaining first chapter searches examinations of smell and public-works projects during the 1860s and 1870s. Similar to the work of environmental historian Andrew Hurley, Mack shows how powerful figures were able to materially and rhetorically cordon off specific racialized populations in working-class areas where pollution was allowed, while creating new middle-class and commercial spaces where embodied experience did not include breathing industrial waste. Mack follows with a discussion of the sensory overload faced by all classes in the wake of the Chicago Fire of 1871. His analysis shows how numerous contemporary chroniclers summarized the fires as too immense to be seen or experienced as a totality. This undistinguishing and demolishing mastery of the flames forced newly levelled social interactions between classes. Such dual flattening provided a literary metaphor that Mack plays well through a pen that deftly illuminates confusions over both social distinction and the fire's immensity.

Mack's history often focusses on the noise of the mob. This emphasis on clamor offers Mack numerous sensory analogies to express his corporeal account of Chicago's role in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. This case study is Mack's finest contribution to sensory historiography. While he discusses noise as central to the perceptions of the strike, he offers an intersensory reading of the multivalent class threats posed by the mob, especially the silence of secret meetings and the transgressive sight of women in public remonstration. For Mack, the Progressive Era that followed Gilded Age experimentation with class struggle involved attempts to centralize control over the sensory worlds of the “rude” masses. Exemplary in this was the construction of George Pullman's model town. The settlement involved the cultivation of a surveying gaze and hoped to create a spectacle of enlightened capitalism where workers could return to clean homes, proper wives, and whiteness. However, the Pullman Strike of 1894 showed just how much the lower class liked to be told how to experience the world through these middle-class sensory forms.

Mack's next chapter describes the sensory experiences of reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). These sensations involved understanding the intersensory plight of the worker and the ways in which factory life alienated the worker's body from the nobility of honest labor, a favorite aphorism of Marx. Herein, Mack offers interesting observations on the often middle-class tone of Sinclair even as the muckraker described the evils of capitalist excesses upon the Rudkus family. The final chapter summarizes the creation of amusement parks meant to calm the working class and the rudimentary sensory worlds they were believed to inhabit. Modelled on the Colombian Exposition of 1893 and early parks in Coney Island, the White City amusement park of Joseph Beifeld on Chicago's South Side was meant to allow for sensory release among its attendees. Part slum tourism, part suburban escape, the amusement park was an acknowledgment that living in urban areas necessitated a sensory release due to the deconstructive and alienating forces of industrial capitalism.

Mack's history, in a beautiful edition with an attractive cover and photographic plates, summarizes a rising rhetoric of oppression applied by the Progressive middle class against the dirtiness, volume, and unsightly behaviors of hoi polloi. Chicago was a “shock city,” a metropolis that entered the Industrial Revolution with such force as to require experimentation with new forms of subjugation and expansion. Asa Briggs's Victorian Cities (1963) described such cities as bound within a discourse of shock, stunned at both the new inventions of modernity and the dominated masses. In an admirable and entertaining publication, Mack does well to often portray this dichotomy through both the striking march of industrial progress and the deplorable sensory worlds of slums, meat grinders, and chemical waste.