Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City by Carl Smith Atlantic Monthly Press Devastation is devastation, whether brought about by fire or pandemic. The Great Chicago Fire […]
The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth and Power by Deirdre Mask St. Martin’s Press In her introduction to The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, […]
Part 1 of this article can be found here. The original inspiration for this article came from a reference in the WPA Guide to Illinois, created by the Federal Writers’ Project. One itinerary advised […]
Note: As a pleasant side effect of the BLM protests, several statues of slavers, traitors, and genocidal invaders have been defaced, toppled, or removed from public view worldwide. Thus far, Chicago statuary […]
Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning By John W. Reps Princeton University Press, 827 pages, out of print, available on the internet starting at $40 Part Two […]
Cities of the American West A History of Frontier Urban Planning By John W. Reps Princeton University Press, 827 pages, available on the internet starting at $40 Part One of Two Parts […]
Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists and Intellectuals 1893–1930 Edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed University of Illinois Press, 296 pages, $28 In November 1904, […]
Like many Chicagoans, Susan Kelsey was likely familiar with Caldwell Woods and the Billy Caldwell Golf Course on the northwest side, but her first introduction to the historical figure behind the name […]
Many very good and even great books have been written about Chicago, and, based on my half century of writing about the city, here are the 10 that, at the moment, I […]
The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago before the Fire Ann Durkin Keating University of Chicago Press, 280 pages, $27.50 When 27-year-old Juliette Kinzie settled with her husband John, the local Indian agent, […]
Binga: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black Banker By Don Hayner Northwestern University Press, 312 pages, $24.95 Reviewed by Patrick T. Reardon A hallmark of the black nationalism movement in […]
It was just about two weeks and seventy-five years ago that the United States Navy would attempt and succeed at an extremely difficult mission that would mark the first of its kind […]
