Helen Shiller—a longtime radical activist and the new alderman in Chicago’s 46th ward—turned 40 on November 24, 1987. Two days later, she went to City Hall for an 11am meeting with […]
In her new book of poetry Woman without Shame, Sandra Cisneros looks aging in the face and laughs. She laughs at the frenetic lusts and couplings of youth—at broken hearts and […]
As a title, An Angel in Sodom is evocative and a bit ambiguous. The subtitle of Jim Elledge’s book is much more direct: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the Gay […]
Last spring, the Chicago Humanities Festival offered a bus tour of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, and this September, offered a tour of the nearby South Shore neighborhood. South Shore is a mostly African […]
Near the end of my hourlong walk around Graceland Cemetery the other day, I went past a stone obelisk, maybe 30 feet tall, and noticed this on the side: SANDRA […]
Louis Sullivan’s Idea, a biography of the 19th century Chicago architect, by Chicago’s first cultural historian Timothy Samuelson, is, in the most literal sense of the word, a beautiful book. […]
Nature is healing. Summer is in full swing, and Lollapalooza is behind us. Fan Expo kicked off our summer convention circuit, and we, the nerds, will be returning to the […]
On paper, the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved Americans on January 1, 1863, during the middle of the Civil War. But not all chattel slaves were immediately manumitted. Union General Gordon […]
The Chicago Humanities Festival sponsored a bus tour of Chicago’s South Side, the “Black Belt,” for the spring Public-themed series. Hosted by “TikTok historian” Shermann “Dilla” Thomas, the two-hour tour began […]
Did you think we would come in first and beat out Boston as the most Irish city? No, but we are second, because of the size of our Irish-American population, […]
City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America By Donald L. Miller Simon & Shuster For a quarter of a century, I’ve used Donald L. […]
Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention By Ben Wilson Anchor Books In the 1850s, Swedish writer Fredricka Bremer visited Chicago and, to say the least, was not […]