Dr. Michelle Moore is a professor of English at the College of DuPage whose most recent book is Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald in Conflict […]
Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect Edited by Romi Crawford Green Lantern Press Performance artist Jefferson Pinder offers, as a fleeting monument to the long-gone Wall of Respect, a piece called […]
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 of the […]
The Social Graces By Renée Rosen Penguin Random House Chicago author Renée Rosen turns east in The Social Graces, a romp through Gilded Age New York’s High Society. From outspending each other […]
Is Wisconsin the furthest state from the Mississippi Delta? Culturally, perhaps. Yet the land of butter burgers and cheese curds played a big role in preserving the blues. While 78 rpm records […]
Chicago is a printing town. In the early 20th century, the many printing houses spawned an entire Printer’s Row, located near the Dearborn train station where the paper arrived and the Loop […]
Salman Rushdie is sometimes asked why, in this age of lies, he chooses to write fiction, adding more untruths to this disjointed world. Rushdie and poet Srikanth Reddy’s Chicago Humanities Festival conversation […]
One Sunday afternoon a number of years ago I found a finger puppet lying outside Maclean House, the former dormitory (now apartments) named in honor of the late Norman Maclean, who was […]
History doesn’t repeat, Mark Twain said: it rhymes. And, as poet and playwright Cornelius Eady and performer Joe Morton both noted during their conversation about Eady’s Brutal Imagination, it keeps on rhyming, […]
DeeMost of us don’t think of imagination when we think of the Secret Service, if we think of them at all. They’re the President’s bodyguards, after all, and how much imagination does […]
Exploring the Land of Lincoln: The Essential Guide to Illinois Historic Sites By Charles Titus 3 Fields Books I asked my non-Illinoisan Twitter followers to tell me three things they knew about […]
The Chicago River, as many of us know, once flowed the other way, into Lake Michigan. It was reversed—a triumph of engineering, at the time—to move sewage and waste water away from […]
