Richard F. Bales, "Did the Cow Do It? A New Look at the Great Chicago Fire," Illinois Historical Journal (Spring 1997)

Robert Cromie, The Great Chicago Fire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958)

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991)

Herman Kogan and Robert Cromie, The Great Fire: Chicago 1871 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1971)

David Lowe, ed., The Great Chicago Fire, In Eyewitness Accounts and 70 Contemporary Photographs (New York: Dover Publications, 1979)

Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)

Ross Miller, American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)

H.A. Musham, "The Great Chicago Fire, October 8-10, 1871," Papers in Illinois History and Transactions for the Year 1940 (1941)

John J. Pauly, "The Great Chicago Fire as a National Event, " American Quarterly 36 (1984)

Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)

Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)

Mel Waskin, Mrs. O'Leary's Comet: Cosmic Causes of the Great Chicago Fire (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985)

There have been numerous articles about the fire in Chicago History, the magazine of the Chicago Historical Society. See, in particular, the Fall 1971 and Fall 1996 issues.

To get a sense of how the fire was discussed in its own time, see the several contemporary histories, such as Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration, which is still available in many libraries.

There have been a number of works on cultural memory, especially in recent years. Selected books include:

John E. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)

Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)

Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)