Dominic A. Pacyga

Dominic A. Pacyga ( May 1, 1949) is an American urban historian. He was a professor of history at Columbia College in Chicago from 1984 until 2017. Previous to his appointment to the faculty he served as associate director of Columbia College's Southeast Chicago Historical Project in Chicago's Steel District. He has worked in urban history, ethnic history and immigration history with a particular emphasis on the Polish diaspora in the United States. He is the author of Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made (2018), Chicago: a Biography (2011), and American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago (2021), each published by the University of Chicago Press, as well as Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880-1922 (1991), published by Ohio State University Press. His new book Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine Is scheduled for publication in September, 2025, by the University of Chicago Press.

Education

Pacyga was born on May 1, 1949, in Chicago. His parents were Joseph B. Pacyga and Pauline Walkosz. His father won two Silver Stars, and two Purple Hearts, serving in the 3rd Armored Division in the ETO, in 1944–45. His mother worked in a Chicago factory that built B29s. Pacyga grew up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of the city and was educated in parochial schools, and the De La Salle Institute in Chicago. Pacyga matriculated at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he earned a BA in 1971, an MA in 1973, and a PhD in 1981. His dissertation on Polish workers in Chicago's South Side, 1880 to 1921, was supervised by Professor Leo Schelbert and had financial support from the Polish American Congress, the Kosciuszko Foundation and the Polish American Scholarship Fund.

Career

Pacyga was an instructor, Family and Community History Center, Newberry Library, in Chicago, where he first developed bus tours of the city's neighborhoods. He became associate director of Columbia College's "Southeast Chicago Historical Project" (1981–1984), a large-scale public history project in the city's Steel District. He then joined the faculty of Columbia College as an unranked professor and became a full professor once rank was finally granted to the faculty in 2005. Before retiring in 2017 he served as department chair and also as interim dean of humanities. Pacyga was a visiting professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1992, and is currently an Affiliated Faculty member of the History Department.

Pacyga has been active in presenting public lectures and appearing in several documentaries, including ‘’Chicago: City of the Century’’ and several episodes of ‘’Chicago Stories’’. Since 1976 Pacyga has presented bus tours of Chicago's neighborhoods focusing on the historical, economic, and demographic trends that created the city. He has also worked on museum exhibits for the Chicago Architecture Foundation; the Museum of Science and Industry; the Chicago Historical Museum; and the Polish Museum of America.

He was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1990–1991 and a visiting fellow at Campion Hall Oxford University, in 2005. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, in 2013–2014. In 2021, he lectured at the 4th International Conference Studying Public History held at the University of Wrocław in Poland.

Pacyga is a board member of the Society of Midland Authors and the Lira Ensemble; He has been a Board member of the Urban History Society, the Immigrant History Society, and the Polish American Historical Association. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. He was head researcher from 2017 to 2024 for the “Back Home: Polish Chicago” exhibit at the Chicago History Museum. Currently he is Curator of Exhibits at the Packingtown Museum in Chicago.

Honors and evaluations

Pacyga has won many academic awards. He won a book award from the Polish American Historical Association. He won the Catholic Book Award. for Chicago: City of Neighborhoods. In 2016 Pacyga was awarded the Illinois State Historical Society's Russell P. Strange Memorial Book of the Year Award for Slaughterhouse. In 2024 the Association of Polish Journalists gave Pacyga the ‘Outstanding Polish Personality Award’.

According to Professor Halina Parafianowicz of the University of Bialystok, American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago is, "a credible, solid, and well-researched history of Polonia’s Chicago. It provides a legitimate perspective and sheds new light on its experience through various stages of its past and present, as the title suggests- -from rise to fall to rebirth. It is an accurate and valuable contribution to the scholarly literature on Chicago and Polonia."

According to Hugh Brogan’s review of Chicago: A Biography, Pacyga: “has a sure grasp of the geographical factors which created and still sustain Chicago, the crossroads of America; has a grasp of economic history, especially labor relations and social history; in particular the development of Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods, could hardly be bettered; and is staggeringly well-informed perhaps too much so: at times he stuns the reader’s mind with a hailstorm of detail.”

Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made explores several key themes in urban economic history. He argues that the Chicago Stockyards played a crucial role in creating a modern industrial culture characterized by large corporations, a factory system merging human and machine labor, and an extensive transportation system based on the railroads linking Chicago to the rural Midwest. He shows how the Union Stock Yard shaped the surrounding ethnic neighborhoods and supported the upward mobility of tens of thousands of immigrant families. He rejects the old Muckraking theme of Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel The Jungle that vividly described filthy and unsanitary practices that Pacyga says did not happen, and he does not accept Sinclair's implication that the stockyards dehumanized the workers. Pacyga applauds the mechanized innovations introduced by the stockyards, which increased worker productivity and wages, while increasing the availability of inexpensive meat to most American families. The stockyards' reflected the Chicago business leaders' disapproval of organized labor. In all Pacyga depicts the rise of the stockyards as an American spectacle of the modern age, one that attracted millions of students and tourists to witness the dramatic scene of meat processing. Pacyga closes by tracing the stockyards' steady decline and disappearance as more profit could be made by moving the slaughtering closer to the western farms. According to Brian McCammack in the American Historical Review in 2019, Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made is "an accessible introduction to the history of Chicago’s famous Stock Yards, holding appeal for a general audience--particularly those interested in Chicago history--and undergraduates.”

Further reading

• D'Sa, Meryl. "Behind the Pen: Meet Chicago Historian Dominic Pacyga" online
• Pacyga, Dominic A. "From Back of the Yards to the College Classroom," in Alan M. Kraut, and David A. Gerber, eds. Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story (Rutgers University Press, 2013) pp. 80–93, autobiographical.
• Salter, Allen. "Dominic Pacyga" The Society of Midland Authors (Jan 21, 2021) online

External links

• Chicago: City of Neighborhoods by Dominic A. Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett (1986) book description and selected chapters.