The title of Jake Johnson’s latest book—Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America—is more than a bit jarring. It’s that part about “Musicals and Mourning” that seems so odd. […]

The expedition of discovery Louis Jolliet, a merchant-explorer, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, undertook with five other men in 1673, was a pivotal moment in the history of North […]

How can someone be so famous and yet so misunderstood? It’s easy if your name is Hillary Clinton. Gary Scott Smith, author of Do All the Good You Can, contends […]

Thomas Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 is an impressive and important book that ranks with other works providing the deepest insights into what makes Chicago, Chicago: Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, […]

In the handful of years after the Civil War, Illinoisans went crazy for baseball, a game that was then spelled as two words “base ball.” By 1868, however, an editor of […]

Dick Simpson is one of those rare political scientists who has also been a politician. He knows how the sausage is made, even if there is much he doesn’t like about […]

Chicago is so much more than its buildings…still they’re hard to miss. Ever since Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable built his home on the Chicago River’s banks, structures have risen […]

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 […]

Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland Jonathan Wright and Dawson Barrett University of Illinois Press I told a friend I was reviewing a book called Punks […]

Note: Deborah Kanter will speak about Chicago Catolico at 2 p.m. on Saturday, February 8, at the National Museum of Mexican Art, (1852 W. 19th St., Chicago). Chicago Catolico: Making […]