Medieval architecture
Medieval architecture is architecture common in the Middle Ages, includes religious and military buildings. Styles include pre-Romanesque and Gothic. While most of the surviving medieval architecture is to be seen in churches and castles, examples of civic and domestic architecture can be found throughout Europe, in manor houses, town halls, almshouses and residential houses; the Latin cross plan, common in medieval ecclesiastical architecture, takes the Roman basilica as its primary model with subsequent developments. It consists of a nave and the altar stands at the east end. Cathedrals influenced or commissioned by Justinian employed the Byzantine style of domes and a Greek cross, with the altar located in the sanctuary on the east side of the church. Surviving examples of medieval secular architecture served for defense. Castles and fortified walls provide the most notable remaining non-religious examples of medieval architecture. Windows gained a cross-shape for more than decorative purposes, they provided a perfect fit for a crossbowman to safely shoot at invaders from inside.
Crenellated walls provided shelters for archers on the roofs to hide behind when not shooting invaders. While much of the surviving medieval architecture is either religious or military, examples of civic and domestic architecture can be found throughout Europe. Examples include manor houses, town halls and bridges, but residential houses. European architecture in the Early Middle Ages may be divided into Early Christian, Romanesque architecture, Russian church architecture, Norse Architecture, Pre-Romanesque, including Merovingian, Carolingian and Asturian. While these terms are problematic, they nonetheless serve adequately as entries into the era. Considerations that enter into histories of each period include Trachtenberg's "historicising" and "modernising" elements, Italian versus northern and Byzantine elements, the religious and political maneuverings between kings and various ecclesiastic officials. Romanesque, prevalent in medieval Europe during the 11th and 12th centuries, was the first pan-European style since Roman Imperial Architecture and examples are found in every part of the continent.
The term was not contemporary with the art it describes, but rather, is an invention of modern scholarship based on its similarity to Roman Architecture in forms and materials. Romanesque is characterized by a use of round or pointed arches, barrel vaults, cruciform piers supporting vaults. Romansque buildings are known throughout Europe; the various elements of Gothic architecture emerged in a number of 11th and 12th century building projects in the Île de France area, but were first combined to form what we would now recognise as a distinctively Gothic style at the 12th century abbey church of Saint-Denis in Saint-Denis, near Paris. Verticality is emphasized in Gothic architecture, which features skeletal stone structures with great expanses of glass, pared-down wall surfaces supported by external flying buttresses, pointed arches using the ogive shape, ribbed stone vaults, clustered columns and pointed spires. Windows contain stained glass, showing stories from lives of saints; such advances in design allowed cathedrals to rise taller than and it became something of an inter-regional contest to build a church as high as possible.
Variations included these Brick Gothic History of Arabic and Western European domes List of medieval stone bridges in Germany List of medieval bridges in France Architecture of the Tarnovo Artistic School Braun, Hugh, An Introduction to English Mediaeval Architecture, London: Faber and Faber, 1951. "Building the House of God: Architectural Metaphor and The Mystic Ark," Codex Aquilarensis: Revista de arte medieval Fletcher, Banister. ISBN 0-7506-2267-9. Cf. Part Two, Chapter 13. Rudolph, Conrad, "Building-Miracles as Artistic Justification in the Early and Mid-Twelfth Century," Radical Art History: Internationale Anthologie, ed. Wolfgang Kersten 398-410 Rudolph,Conrad, "The Architectural Metaphor in Western Medieval Artistic Culture: From the Cornerstone to The Mystic Ark," The Cambridge History of Religious Architecture, ed. Stephen Murray The stave churches in Norway
Single-family detached home
A stand-alone house is a free-standing residential building. Sometimes referred to as a single-family home, as opposed to a multi-family residential dwelling; the definition of this type of house may vary between statistical agencies. The definition, however includes two elements: a single-family means that the building is a structure maintained and used as a single dwelling unit. Though a dwelling unit shares one or more walls with another dwelling unit, it is a single family residence if it has direct access to a street or thoroughfare and does not share heating facilities, hot water equipment, nor any other essential facility or service with any other dwelling unit. In some jurisdictions, allowances are made for basement suites or mother-in-law suites without changing the description from "single family", it does exclude, any short-term accommodation, large-scale rental accommodation, or condominiums. Most single-family homes are built on lots larger than the structure itself, adding an area surrounding the house, called a yard in North American English or a garden in British English.
Garages can be found on most lots. Houses with an attached front entry garage, closer to the street than any other part of the house is derisively called a snout house. Terms corresponding to single-family detached home in common use are single-family home, single-detached dwelling, detached house, separate house. In the United Kingdom, the term single-family home is unknown, except through Internet exposure to U. S. media. Whereas in the U. S. housing is divided into "single-family homes", "multi-family dwellings", "condo/townhouse", etc. the primary division of residential property in British terminology is between "houses" and "flats". In pre-industrial societies, most people lived in multi-family dwellings for most of their lives. A child lived with their parents from birth until marriage, generally moved in with the parents of the man or the woman, so that the grandparents could help raise the young children and so the middle generation could care for their aging parents; this type of arrangement saved some of the effort and materials used for construction and, in colder climates, heating.
If people had to move to a new place or were wealthy enough, they could build or buy a home for their own family, but this was not the norm. The idea of a nuclear family living separately from their relatives as the norm is a recent development related to rising living standards in North America and Europe during the early modern and modern eras. In the New World, where land was plentiful, settlement patterns were quite different from the close-knit villages of Europe, meaning many more people lived in large farms separated from their neighbors; this has produced a cultural preference in settler societies for space. A countervailing trend has been industrialization and urbanization, which has seen more and more people around the world move into multi-story apartment blocks. In the New World, this type of densification was halted and reversed following the Second World War when increased automobile ownership and cheaper building and heating costs produced suburbanization instead. Single-family homes are now common in rural and suburban and some urban areas across the New World and Europe, as well as wealthier enclaves within the Third World.
They are most common in high-income regions. For example, in Canada, according to the 2006 census, 55.3% of the population lived single-detached houses but this varied by region. In the ville of Montreal, Canada's second-most populous municipality, only 7.5% of the population lived in single-detached homes, while in the city of Calgary, the third most populous, 57.8% did. Note that this includes the "city limits" populations only, not the wider region; the term "single-family detached" describes who lives in it. It does not indicate shape, or location; because they are not surrounded by other buildings, the potential size of a single-family house is limited only by the budget of the builder and local law. They can range from a tiny country cottage or cabin or a small suburban prefabricated home to a large mansion, aristocratic estate or stately home. Sizes in real estate advertising are given in area, or by the number of bedrooms or bathrooms/toilets; the choice in materials used or the shape chosen will depend on what is common to the vernacular architecture of that region, or the lasting trends in professionally designed tract housing.
A traditional log and plaster hut, a timber frame and drywall North American starter home, or a European-style concrete-and-slate house are all varieties of single-family detached housing. Single-detached homes have both disadvantages; the entire space around the building is private to the owner and family, in most cases, one can add onto the existing house if more room is needed. They typically have no property management fees, such as the ones associated with condominia and townhomes; these are considered advantages. Since single detached homes are built in places where land is more plentiful, there is a distinct cost advantage per square foot (although this varies based
Apse
In architecture, an apse is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault or semi-dome known as an exedra. In Byzantine and Gothic Christian church architecture, the term is applied to a semi-circular or polygonal termination of the main building at the liturgical east end, regardless of the shape of the roof, which may be flat, domed, or hemispherical. Smaller apses may be in other locations shrines. An apse is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault; the apse of a church, cathedral or basilica is the semicircular or polygonal termination to the choir or sanctuary, or sometimes at the end of an aisle. In relation to church architecture it is the name given to where the altar is placed or where the clergy are seated. An apse is found in a synagogue, e.g. Maoz Haim Synagogue; the apse is separated from the main part of the church by the transept. Smaller apses are sometimes built in locations other than the east end for reliquaries or shrines of saints; the domed apse became a standard part of the church plan in the early Christian era.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church tradition, the south apse is known as diaconicon and the north apse as prothesis. Various ecclesiastical features of which the apse may form part are drawn together here: The chancel, directly to the east beyond the choir contains the High Altar, where there is one; this area is reserved for the clergy, was therefore called the "presbytery," from the Greek presbuteros meaning "elder", or in older and Catholic usage, "priest". Hemi-cyclic choirs, first developed in the East, came to use in France in 470. By the onset of the 13th century, they had been augmented with radiating apse chapels outside the choir aisle, the entire structure of Apse and radiating chapels coming to be known as the chevet. Famous northern French examples of chevets are in the Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Reims; such radiating chapels are found in England in Norwich and Canterbury cathedrals, but the developed feature is French, though the Francophile connoisseur Henry III introduced it into Westminster Abbey.
The word "ambulatory" refers to a curving aisle in the apse that passes behind the altar and choir, giving access to chapels in the chevet. An "ambulatory" may refer to the arcade passages that enclose a cloister in a monastery, or to other types of aisles round the edge of a church building, for example in circular churches. Architectural development of the eastern end of cathedrals in England and France Byzantine architecture Cathedral architecture Church architecture Narthex Joseph Nechvatal, "Immersive Excess in the Apse of Lascaux", Technonoetic Arts 3, no. 3, 2005. Spiers, Richard Phené. "Apse". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 231–232. This has a detailed description of examples in the early church
Arabs
Arabs are a population inhabiting the Arab world. They live in the Arab states in Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and western Indian Ocean islands, they form a significant diaspora, with Arab communities established around the world. The first mention of Arabs is from the mid-ninth century BCE as a tribal people in eastern and southern Syria and the north of the Arabian Peninsula; the Arabs appear to have been under the vassalage of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the succeeding Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid and Parthian empires. Arab tribes, most notably the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, begin to appear in the southern Syrian Desert from the mid 3rd century CE onward, during the mid to stages of the Roman and Sasanian empires. Before the expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate, "Arab" referred to any of the nomadic and settled Semitic people from the Arabian Peninsula, Syrian Desert, North and Lower Mesopotamia. Today, "Arab" refers to a large number of people whose native regions form the Arab world due to the spread of Arabs and the Arabic language throughout the region during the early Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries and the subsequent Arabisation of indigenous populations.
The Arabs forged the Rashidun, Umayyad and the Fatimid caliphates, whose borders reached southern France in the west, China in the east, Anatolia in the north, the Sudan in the south. This was one of the largest land empires in history. In the early 20th century, the First World War signalled the end of the Ottoman Empire; this resulted in the defeat and dissolution of the empire and the partition of its territories, forming the modern Arab states. Following the adoption of the Alexandria Protocol in 1944, the Arab League was founded on 22 March 1945; the Charter of the Arab League endorsed the principle of an Arab homeland whilst respecting the individual sovereignty of its member states. Today, Arabs inhabit the 22 Arab states within the Arab League: Algeria, Comoros, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen; the Arab world stretches around 13 million km2, from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean in the southeast.
Beyond the boundaries of the League of Arab States, Arabs can be found in the global diaspora. The ties that bind Arabs are ethnic, cultural, identical, nationalist and political; the Arabs have their own customs, architecture, literature, dance, cuisine, society and mythology. The total number of Arabs are an estimated 450 million. Arabs are a diverse group in terms of religious practices. In the pre-Islamic era, most Arabs followed polytheistic religions; some tribes had adopted Christianity or Judaism, a few individuals, the hanifs observed monotheism. Today, about 93% of Arabs are adherents of Islam, there are sizable Christian minorities. Arab Muslims belong to the Sunni, Shiite and Alawite denominations. Arab Christians follow one of the Eastern Christian Churches, such as the Greek Orthodox or Greek Catholic churches. Other smaller minority religions are followed, such as the Bahá'í Faith and Druze. Arabs have influenced and contributed to diverse fields, notably the arts and architecture, philosophy, ethics, politics, music, cinema, medicine and technology in the ancient and modern history.
The earliest documented use of the word "Arab" to refer to a people appears in the Kurkh Monoliths, an Akkadian language record of the ninth century BCE Assyrian conquest of Aram, which referred to Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula under King Gindibu, who fought as part of a coalition opposed to Assyria. Listed among the booty captured by the army of king Shalmaneser III of Assyria in the Battle of Qarqar are 1000 camels of "Gi-in-di-bu'u the ar-ba-a-a" or " Gindibu belonging to the Arab; the related word ʾaʿrāb is used to refer to Bedouins today, in contrast to ʿarab which refers to Arabs in general. The term Arab and ʾaʿrāb are mentioned around 40 times in pre-Islamic Sabaean inscriptions; the term Arab occurs in the titles of the Himyarite kings from the time of'Abu Karab Asad until MadiKarib Ya'fur. The term ʾaʿrāb is driven from the term Arab according to Sabaean grammar; the term is mentioned in Quranic verses referring to people who were living in Madina and it might be a south Arabian loan-word into Quranic language.
The oldest surviving indication of an Arab national identity is an inscription made in an archaic form of Arabic in 328 using the Nabataean alphabet, which refers to Imru' al-Qays ibn'Amr as "King of all the Arabs". Herodotus refers to the Arabs in the Sinai, southern Palestine, the frankincense region. Other ancient Greek historians like Agatharchides, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo mention Arabs living in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, southern Jordan, the Syrian steppe and in eastern Arabia. Inscriptions dating to the 6th century BCE in Yemen include the term "Arab"; the most popular Arab account holds that the word "Arab" came from an eponymous father called Ya'rub, the first to speak Arabic. A
Exeter College, Oxford
Exeter College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England and the fourth oldest college of the University. The college is located on Turl Street, where it was founded in 1314 by Devon-born Walter de Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter, as a school to educate clergymen. At its foundation Exeter was popular with the sons of the Devonshire gentry, though has since become associated with a much broader range of notable alumni, including William Morris, J. R. R. Tolkien, Richard Burton, Roger Bannister, Alan Bennett, Philip Pullman; as of 2018, the college had an estimated financial endowment of £74.5 million. Still situated in its original location in Turl Street, Exeter College was founded in 1314 by Walter de Stapledon of Devon, Bishop of Exeter and treasurer to Edward II, as a school to educate clergy. During its first century, it was known as Stapeldon Hall and was smaller, with just twelve to fourteen students; the college grew from the 15th century onward, began offering rooms to its students.
The College motto is "Floreat Exon.", meaning "Let Exeter Flourish". In the 16th century, donations from Sir William Petre, assumed to be an Exeter graduate, whose daughter Dorothy Wadham was a co-founder with her husband Nicholas Wadham of Wadham College, created the eight Petrean Fellowships, further contributions from his son John Petre, 1st Baron Petre helped to expand and transform the college. Sir John Acland, a Devonshire gentleman, donated £800, which financed the building of a new dining hall, established two scholarships for poor students, the first to be created at the college. In a clever move by the bursar to fill the new buildings as they were completed, a significant number of noble Roman Catholic students were invited to enrol and take classes at the enlarged college; as a result, over time, Exeter College became one of the leading colleges in the University. In the 18th century the college experienced declining popularity, as did all of Oxford's other colleges. University reforms in the 1850s helped to end this period of stagnation.
For over six centuries after its founding, women were not permitted to study at Exeter, but in 1979 it joined many other men's colleges in admitting its first female students. In 1993 Exeter College became the first of the former all-male colleges to elect a woman, Marilyn Butler, as its rector; when Butler's tenure expired in October 2004, the college elected another woman—Frances Cairncross, former senior editor of The Economist—as rector. In 2014, the author J. K. Rowling was elected an honorary fellow of the college. Formed in the 1850s, the Adelphi Wine Club is reputed to be one of the oldest three wine clubs in Oxford; the club draws its membership from undergraduates studying at Exeter College. It has been forcibly closed down by college authorities several times throughout its tumultuous existence and is believed to be dormant; the club was renowned for its extravagant dinners, for excessive gambling after each meeting. One black ball was sufficient to exclude an undergraduate from membership.
Beginning in 1923, the college forbade any student holding an exhibition or scholarship to join the club. Notable members include Sir Martin Le Quesne, J. P. V. D. Balsdon. Exeter College is the basis for the fictional Jordan College in Philip Pullman's novel trilogy His Dark Materials; the 2007 film version of the first novel, The Golden Compass, used the college for location filming. The final episode of Inspector Morse, The Remorseful Day, was filmed in the college chapel and Front Quadrangle, where Morse has a heart attack; the Front Quadrangle sits on the site of the medieval college, although of the earliest buildings, only Palmer's Tower in the north-eastern corner remains. Constructed in 1432, the tower, once the primary entrance to the college, now houses various offices and lodgings for fellows, at its base is a memorial to members who were killed in the Second World War; the quadrangle is dominated by the chapel, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and constructed in 1854–60, inspired by the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.
On the opposite side stands the hall, constructed in 1618, notable for its vaulted ceilings and numerous fine portraits, underneath, the college bar. Building work over the following century resulted in the quadrangle taking on its current appearance in 1710; the Front Quadrangle houses the Junior and Senior Common Rooms, as well as lodgings for fellows and undergraduates. The Margary quadrangle was completed in 1964 with the construction of the Thomas Wood building to commemorate the 650th anniversary of the college and named for Ivan Margary, who paid for its restoration; the quadrangle incorporates the rector's lodgings, designed by Gilbert Scott and constructed in 1864, staircases nine and eleven erected during the 19th century. A passageway from the Front Quadrangle leads through to the college's Fellows' Garden, in which stands the library, designed by Gilbert Scott in the 13th-century style; the area is bounded on the left hand side by Convocation House, the Divinity School and the Bodleian Library, on the right by Brasenose Lane.
The Mound, situated at the end of the Garden, offers views over Radcliffe Square, including All Souls College and the Radcliffe Camera. In 2007–08, the college purchased the main site of Ruskin College on nearby Walton Street for £7 million; the site was redeveloped to provide a range of student bedrooms, teaching rooms, study space. In 2017 it was formally opened, named Cohen Quad for the parents of Sir
Chadderton
Chadderton is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham, in Greater Manchester, England. It lies along the course of the River Irk and the Rochdale Canal, on undulating land in the foothills of the Pennines, 1 mile west of Oldham, 4.5 miles south of Rochdale and 6 miles northeast of the city of Manchester. Part of Lancashire, Chadderton's early history is marked by its status as a manorial township, with its own line of lords and overlords, who included the Asshetons, Chethams and Traffords. Chadderton in the Middle Ages was chiefly distinguished by its two mansions, Foxdenton Hall and Chadderton Hall, by the prestigious families who occupied them. Farming was the main industry of the area, with locals supplementing their incomes by hand-loom woollen weaving in the domestic system. Chadderton's urbanisation and expansion coincided with developments in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian era. A late 19th century factory-building boom transformed Chadderton from a rural township into a major mill town—one of several in its region—and the second most populous urban district in the United Kingdom.
More than 50 cotton mills had been built in Chadderton by 1914. Although Chadderton's industries declined during the mid-20th century, the town continued to grow as a result of suburbanisation and urban renewal; the legacy of the town's industrial past remains visible in its landscape of red-brick cotton mills, now used as warehouses or distribution centres. Some of these are listed buildings because of their architectural and cultural significance; the name Chadderton derives from Caderton, believed to be a combination of the Brythonic word Cader or Cater, indicating a fortified place amongst the hills, or the cadeir, "chair, throne", the Old English suffix -ton meaning a settlement. The University of Nottingham's Institute for Name-Studies has offered a similar suggestion, that the name Chadderton means "farm or settlement at the hill called Cadeir"; this name is believed to date from the 7th century, when Angles colonised the region following the Battle of Chester. It has been suggested that the Anglian settlers found a few Brythonic Celts inhabiting what is now called Chadderton, borrowed their name for the hill, "Chadder", adding their own word for a settlement to the end.
Archaic spellings include Chaderthon, Chaderton and Chatherton. The first known written record of the name Chadderton is in a legal document relating to land tenure, in about 1220; the study of place names in Chadderton suggests. Remains of Roman roads have been discovered running through the town, the local road name Streetbridge suggests that the Romans once marched along it on a path which may have led to Blackstone Edge. Relics found at a tumulus in Chadderton Fold date from the Early Middle Ages from the early period of Anglo-Saxon England, when Angles settled in the area and Chadderton emerged as a manor of the hundred of Salford. Chadderton is not recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, its first appearance in a written record is in a legal document from around 1220, which states that Robert, Rector of Prestwich, gave land to Richard, son of Gilbert, in exchange for an annual fee of one silver penny. Following the Norman conquest, Chadderton was made a constituent manor of the wider Royal Estate of Tottington, an extensive fee held by the Norman overlord, Roger de Montbegon.
Taxation and governance continued on this basis throughout the Middle Ages, with the Barons Montbegon of Hornby Castle holding the estate, until it passed to the Barons Lacy of Clitheroe Castle, onto local families. In about 1235, the sub-manor of Chadderton and Foxdenton passed from Richard de Trafford of Trafford Park to Geoffrey de Trafford, who adopted the surname of Chadderton, thus founding the Chadderton family. During the High Middle Ages, pieces of land in Chadderton were granted to religious orders and institutions, including Cockersand Abbey and the Knights Hospitaller; the manorial system was strong in Chadderton, this lent distinction to the township, in a region which otherwise had weak local lordship. Throughout the Middle Ages, the manor of Chadderton constituted a township, centred on the hill by the banks of the River Irk, known as Chadderton Fold; the fold consisted of a cluster of cottages centred on Chadderton Hall manor house, a water-powered corn mill. Chadderton Hall occupied by the de Chaddertons.
Geoffrey de Chadderton became the Lord of the Manor of Tottington in the 13th century. The de Chaddertons' involvement in regional and national affairs gave prestige to what was otherwise an obscure and rural township. William Chaderton was Bishop of Chester from 1579 to 1595 and held distinguished academic posts such as Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity. Laurence Chaderton was the first Master of Emmanuel College and among the first translators of the King James Version of the Bible. Tottington was dissolved in the mid-15th century and there came a succession of distinguished families, each headed by an esquire with links to the monarchs of England; the Radclyffe and Horton families provided six High Sheriffs of Lancashire and a Governor of the Isle of Man. Apart from the dignitaries who lived in Chadderton's manor houses, Chadderton's population during the Middle Ages comprised a small community of retainers, most of whom were occupied in farming, either growing and milling of grain and cereal or raising cattle, sheep and domestic fowl.
Workers supplemented their incomes by hand-loom weaving of wool at home. The community was ravaged by an outbreak of the Black Death in 1646; until the mid-18th century, the
Chicago
Chicago the City of Chicago, is the most populous city in Illinois, as well as the third most populous city in the United States. With an estimated population of 2,716,450, it is the most populous city in the Midwest. Chicago is the principal city of the Chicago metropolitan area referred to as Chicagoland, the county seat of Cook County, the second most populous county in the United States; the metropolitan area, at nearly 10 million people, is the third-largest in the United States, the fourth largest in North America and the third largest metropolitan area in the world by land area. Located on the shores of freshwater Lake Michigan, Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed and grew in the mid-nineteenth century. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed several square miles and left more than 100,000 homeless, the city made a concerted effort to rebuild; the construction boom accelerated population growth throughout the following decades, by 1900 Chicago was the fifth largest city in the world.
Chicago made noted contributions to urban planning and zoning standards, including new construction styles, the development of the City Beautiful Movement, the steel-framed skyscraper. Chicago is an international hub for finance, commerce, technology, telecommunications, transportation, it is the site of the creation of the first standardized futures contracts at the Chicago Board of Trade, which today is the largest and most diverse derivatives market gobally, generating 20% of all volume in commodities and financial futures. O'Hare International Airport is the one of the busiest airports in the world, the region has the largest number of U. S. highways and greatest amount of railroad freight. In 2012, Chicago was listed as an alpha global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, it ranked seventh in the entire world in the 2017 Global Cities Index; the Chicago area has one of the highest gross domestic products in the world, generating $680 billion in 2017. In addition, the city has one of the world's most diversified and balanced economies, not being dependent on any one industry, with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce.
Chicago's 58 million domestic and international visitors in 2018, made it the second most visited city in the nation, behind New York City's approximate 65 million visitors. The city ranked first place in the 2018 Time Out City Life Index, a global quality of life survey of 15,000 people in 32 cities. Landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Grant Park, the Museum of Science and Industry, Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago's culture includes the visual arts, film, comedy and music jazz, soul, hip-hop and electronic dance music including house music. Of the area's many colleges and universities, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago are classified as "highest research" doctoral universities. Chicago has professional sports teams in each of the major professional leagues, including two Major League Baseball teams; the name "Chicago" is derived from a French rendering of the indigenous Miami-Illinois word shikaakwa for a wild relative of the onion, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum and known more as ramps.
The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as "Checagou" was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir. Henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the eponymous wild "garlic" grew abundantly in the area. According to his diary of late September 1687:...when we arrived at the said place called "Chicagou" which, according to what we were able to learn of it, has taken this name because of the quantity of garlic which grows in the forests in this region. The city has had several nicknames throughout its history such as the Windy City, Chi-Town, Second City, the City of the Big Shoulders, which refers to the city's numerous skyscrapers and high-rises. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, who had taken the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples; the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable arrived in the 1780s, he is known as the "Founder of Chicago".
In 1795, following the Northwest Indian War, an area, to be part of Chicago was turned over to the United States for a military post by native tribes in accordance with the Treaty of Greenville. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn and rebuilt; the Ottawa and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis; the Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people. On June 15, 1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. Receiver of Public Monies; the City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4, 1837, for several decades was the world's fastest-growing city. As the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States.
Chicago's first railway and Chicago Union Railroad, the Illi
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