Do you think all biographies would have a similar distribution of verb tenses? What might affect the choices?

Look at the verbs in these biographies of people connected with Chicago. How many verbs of each kind do you find? (Ignore the verbs with modal auxiliaries .. can / may / must , etc .... for now.): (If you click on these links and hold until the menu appears, you can choose "new window .. or new browser .. with this link", and have both windows open. Then you can adjust them so that part of each is always visible, and you can easily move back and forth between them.)

• Marshall Field
• Jane Addams
• Al Capone
• Richard J. Daley

After you look at the verbs in each biography, consider these questions:

• What TIME are most of the verbs? Does the time change? Where? Why?
  
• Are events described in the order in which they happened?
• Note the verbs in the progressive and perfect ASPECTS. Are there very many? Can you see why the writer chose to use these aspects?

II. Now try your hand at choosing appropriate verb tenses in this article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica about the history of Chicago:

Settlement and early activity

In 1673 the French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette followed an Indian portage to the mudflats over which a Y-shaped river . It into Lake Michigan , while its arms nearly to the drainage basin of the Mississippi River system, thus virtually linking two great North American waterways. The meaning of the Indian name for the region disputed -- among the possibilities are "skunk," "wild onion," or "powerful."

Trappers, traders, and adventurers the area for portage and barter throughout the 18th century. The first known non-Indian settler Jean Baptiste Point Sable (or Pointe du Sable), son of a wealthy French merchant who to Haiti and a black woman there. Sable in the Great Lakes area in the 1770s. In 1795 the United States a six-mile-square area about the river mouth.

Ft. Dearborn, built in 1803, in 1812 and all but one of its military and civilian population in an Indian raid. The fort in 1816 and until the 1830s. Outside its walls a cluster of traders' shacks and log cabins , but the settlement little interest even after Illinois, with most of its population in the central and southern regions, a state in 1818.

The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, joining the Atlantic states and the Great Lakes , the main axis of westward movement northward from the Ohio River route. Soon afterward, Chicago the principal western terminus. The county of Cook its seat at the small community, and the regional federal land office there. Numerous retail stores to outfit newcomers to the West, and the volume of animal pelts and products for Eastern markets . In 1837, the year Chicago incorporated as a city, its population about 4,200.

Chicago's geographic potentiality as a water gateway by completion in 1848 of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, linking the Great Lakes and Mississippi systems. A pair of railroad lines from the East into Chicago in 1852, and by 1856 it the nation's chief rail center. A belt line the radiating trunk lines by 1856, and commuter service to outlying neighborhoods and suburbs .

Growth and development
Explosive economic growth

Industry the rails. By the late 1850s lake vessels iron ore from the Upper Michigan ranges to the blast furnaces of Chicago. Chicago the nation's major lumber-distributing center by the 1880s. The railroads farm produce from west and south, and Chicago's Board of Trade the nerve center of the commodities market. The railroads also cattle, hogs, and sheep to Chicago for slaughtering and packing. The consolidated Union Stock Yards, largely bankrolled by nine railroads and the owners of several other Chicago stockyards, on Christmas Day 1865.

Chicago as the major city of the Midwest. Its 1880 census more than 500,000 inhabitants, a 17-fold increase over 1850; by 1870 it St. Louis, Mo. in population. It the site of the 1860 Republican National Convention at which Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln the presidential nomination. Both Americans and northern European immigrants, drawn by Chicago's factories and carried by the rail network that in Chicago, to pour into the city.

Four square miles of Chicago, including the business district, by fire on October 8Ð10, 1871. Starting in the southwest, fed by wooden buildings and pavements and favored by a long dry spell, flames northeastward, leaping the Chicago River and dying out only when they Lake Michigan. About 250 lives , some 90,000 people homeless, and almost $200,000,000 in property .

The rebuilt city and its people

Much of the city's physical infrastructure , however, including its water-supply and sewage systems and transportation facilities. Chicago rapidly in a similar pattern, although with buildings that more modern and in conformance with new fire regulations.

The central business district, bounded by the Chicago River to the north and west and by the railroad along the lakeshore to the east, the major department stores, the larger banks, the Board of Trade, the regional headquarters of rising national corporations, and the centers of commerce, law, and government. The district the birthplace of the steel-frame skyscraper. Completion of the Home Insurance Building in 1885 during the next nine years to the construction of 21 buildings ranging from 12 to 16 stories throughout the downtown area. Commuter railroads, horse, cable, and electric street railways, and elevated rapid-transit lines the Loop.

The Lake Michigan shore the center for the homes and civic pursuits of Chicago's economic and social elite. Lake Shore Drive north of the Loop as the mainline for society -- the Gold Coast, it . Although blighted by the Illinois Central Railroad yards, the waterfront east of the Loop and named Grant Park.

Heavy industry, warehouses, and rail yards the banks of the Chicago River. Industrial pockets also at Chicago's outskirts. At the far south, where the Calumet River meets Lake Michigan, steel mills a polyglot community of blue-collar workers and their families. The Union Stock Yards another South Side area, Back-of-the-Yards, made infamous in Upton Sinclair's scathing novel of industrial oppression, The Jungle (1906). Public health and sanitary conditions an outrage: until 1900 Lake Michigan both fresh water to Chicago and its untreated sewage, a condition probably responsible for the city's frequent epidemics.

Many of the working families in the second great wave of European immigration: Russian Jews, Italians, Poles, Serbs, Croatians, Bohemians, and other groups from southern and eastern Europe. The 1890 and 1900 censuses that more than three-fourths of Chicago's population of the foreign-born and their children.

The working districts fertile ground for social action. The labor movement the mark of its early attempts at industrial organizing: the Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which workers and lawmen alike ; and an 1894 strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company, led by pioneer organizer Eugene V. Debs and others. Social work another influence: Jane Addams and her followers at Hull House, a West Side settlement, to improve the wretched conditions of housing and health there

In 1889 Chicago numerous inner suburbs, doubling its area and its population (to almost 1,100,000) and surpassing Philadelphia as America's second most populous city. By 1900 it a center of nearly all parts of the U.S. economy as well as of social insurgency and reform, immigration, education, and even culture. Chicago also a brawling spirit evident not only along the dingy streets of the immigrant ghettos but also in corporate boardrooms and in the most elegant brothel in the nation, which royalty from abroad and millionaires from the newly sprawling suburbs.

This Chicago particularly striking to writers and visitors. "I a city -- a real city -- and they it Chicago," wrote Rudyard Kipling . "The other places ." And, he , "Having seen it, I urgently never to see it again. It by savages."

Symbols of civic consolidation
A major expression of the city's character the Plan of Chicago (1909), by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, which the general outlines of turn-of-the-century Chicago, the nations of style possessed by the city's industrial and mercantile elite, and a vision of the future. The plan by the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition -- for which Chicago New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. -- celebrating the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. Built on the Midway Plaisance adjacent to the University of Chicago (endowed in 1891 by John D. Rockefeller), the exposition's buildings a stylistic union of Classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Bourbon Paris

Nonetheless, the exposition activity in city planning not only in Chicago but also throughout the world. The "City Beautiful" movement civic thought for several decades, influencing even some federal buildings in Washington, D.C. The Classicism of the exposition in marked contrast, however, to the modern Chicago School of architecture, and the two trends concurrently during the following decades. Chicago a world center of architectural innovation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with many notable buildings by Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Henry H. Richardson.

The Burnham Plan, as it to be called, many subsequently developed features: park areas along Lake Michigan that beaches, boulevards, and yacht basins; a belt of forest preserves rimming the city for recreation; the widening of arterial streets; a civic center; and a double-decked boulevard in the central area along the Chicago River. Until 1939 the quasi-official Chicago Plan Commission individual features of the plan, which, like Burnham's admonition, "Make no little plans," to have a profound effect on Chicago.

The 20th century
Chicago's population growth less spectacular in the 20th century, though industrial expansion associated with World Wars I and II and the postwar prosperity to attract newcomers. Most pronounced the influx of blacks from the South seeking industrial employment. A building boom in the city and suburbs abruptly following the stockmarket collapse of 1929, and during the next decade the population only slightly, to about 3,400,000 in 1940. Possibly contributing to this slowed growth the worldwide notoriety of Chicago (only in part deserved) as the playground of underworld figures during the Prohibition era, the failure of several Chicago banks during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the allegedly powerful grip of criminal syndicates on many aspects of economic and political life. In contrast, however, the suburban population rapidly during this period.

After World War II, construction slow to resume until [Mayor Richard J.] Daley's election in 1955. Massive rebuilding programs a hallmark of his terms in office, including an almost total alteration of the skyline of the Loop and adjacent areas. As in most cities the downtown area, although it as the center for offices, from a decline in other functions, including retailing, entertainment, and wholesale distribution, while rapid expansion of those activities on the periphery and in suburban areas. The 1970 census that, for the first time, the city itself less than half of the metropolitan population.

Ann Salzmann
Intensive English Institute
University of Illinois