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 […]
Sacred City By Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. University of New Mexico Press The Teddy in Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s new short story collection Sacred City has a way […]
David Anthony Witter was born in Miller, Indiana—“across the lagoon from Nelson Algren’s summer home,” as he puts it—but has spent most of his life in Chicago. Growing up in […]
Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend By Jackie Kay Vintage Books Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, liked to spend money on herself and on her friends, […]
There is a street in the South Loop—Dearborn from Polk to Harrison is only one block long—that is one of the most charming blocks in the city. I say the […]
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America—The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert Princeton Architectural Press Black Lives 1900: […]
A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America By Benjamin Sells Northwestern University Press Let me tell you: I’m a huge Chicago history […]
Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago By Brian McCammack Harvard University Press For African Americans who took part in the Great Migration in the first half […]