Chicago (metro), home to ten million people, is the main city of the Midwest, the area of America that lies south of the Great Lakes. Chicago is near the southern end of Lake Michigan, the biggest lake.

Today it is a huge, thriving city (properly known as a metropolitan area). From the tops of the downtown skyscrapers, it appears to run off as far as the eye can see. It is ten million people going about their daily lives in a city whose streets were laid out in a grid nearly two hundred years ago. No village, town or city existed before the early 1800s. So the growth of the city has been, to put it mildly, spectacular.

Chicago grew as a boom town based on cattle and the railroad, it was nearly destroyed by fire in the 1870s, it picked itself up and then weathered hard times of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

It has been a town of immigrants, for how else would it have grown so rapidly. There have been many peoples from the southern states and millions from overseas. First they came from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Then from Germany, Sweden and Norway. Then from Poland and Russia, then from India, Africa and China. So what you see today is a great hotchpotch of people who have all struggled together to forge a great city.