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Chicago Fire
In autumn eighteen seventy-one, Chicago’s skyline promised progress, but under its wooden skin, disaster waited. One still night, ambition and vulnerability would meet, and the city’s future would hinge on a single spark.Picture a city surging with energy. Nearly three hundred thousand people pressed into neighborhoods built at a dizzying pace. Railroads, grain elevators, and lumber yards crowded the city’s edge. Chicago was the crossroads of a nation on the move. Yet for all its modern bustle, the city’s bones were fragile—timber, pine, and wooden sidewalks everywhere you looked. Fire was an…
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