A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY21 start with E start with E
At fifteen, Earl Burrus Dickerson stowed away on a train in Canton, Mississippi, fleeing the racial oppression of his native South. But Chicago, the boy's destination, was no haven of racial fairness and equality. His flight north was in fact the beginning of a journey that would last a lifetime--and would forever pit Dickerson against the forces of racial injustice. Earl B. Dickerson's story, told here for the first time, is one of courage and character, of remarkable accomplishment in the face of terrible odds; it is also emblematic of the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights--a crucial chapter of African American history as it was lived by one uncompromising individual.
In this book, Robert J. Blakely tells how Dickerson (1891-1986) worked his way through preparatory schools and college, a segregated officer's training school, and law school at the University of Chicago. The story follows Dickerson's career as general counsel to the first insurance company owned and operated by African Americans; the first African American Democratic alderman elected to the Chicago City Council; a member of FDR's first Fair Employment Practices Committee; leader of the movement that broke the color barrier to membership in the Illinois Bar Association; and, perhaps most famously, the power behind Hansberry v. Lee, the U.S. Supreme Court case that marked the beginning of the end of restrictive real estate covenants--one of the most pernicious legal tools of segregation in the North. Blakely gives us a sense of the man behind the achievements, the life that defied conventions and statistics, and the world in which "the dean of Chicago's black lawyers" became a pioneering architect for equal opportunity in American life.
Extravagantly illustrated with over seventy photographs, drawings, paintings, and contemporary cartoons, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow documents the mixture of amazement and alarm with which European visitors greeted 1890s Chicago: as a futuristic city animated by a crass, frenetic mercantile class. This volume also contains an extensive bibliography, arranged by country, and profiles of the foreign observers who sought the implications for European culture in what Asa Briggs called the "shock city" of the western world.
Combining the incisive pen of a newspaperman and the compassionate soul of a poet, Mike Royko became a Chicago institution—in Jimmy Breslin’s words, "the best journalist of his time." Early Royko: Up Against It in Chicago will restore to print the legendary columnist’s earliest writings, which chronicle 1960s Chicago with the moral vision, ironic sense, and razor-sharp voice that would remain Royko’s trademark.
This collection of early columns from the Chicago Daily News ranges from witty social commentary to politically astute satire. Some of the pieces are falling-down funny and others are tenderly nostalgic, but all display Royko’s unrivaled skill at using humor to tell truth to power. From machine politicians and gangsters to professional athletes, from well-heeled Chicagoans to down-and-out hoodlums, no one escapes Royko’s penetrating gaze—and resounding judgment. Early Royko features a memorable collection of characters, including such well-known figures as Hugh Hefner, Mayor Richard J. Daley, and Dr. Martin Luther King. But these boldfaced names are juxtaposed with Royko’s beloved lesser knowns from the streets of Chicago: Mrs. Peak, Sylvester "Two-Gun Pete" Washington, and Fats Boylermaker, who gained fame for leaning against a corner light pole from 2 a.m. Saturday until noon Sunday, when his neighborhood tavern reopened for business.
Accompanied by a foreword from Rick Kogan, this new edition will delight Royko’s most ardent fans and capture the hearts of a new generation of readers. As Kogan writes, Early Royko "will remind us how a remarkable relationship began—Chicago and Royko, Royko and Chicago—and how it endures."
Lavishly illustrated with nearly three hundred gorgeous full-color photos, this engaging guidebook carefully describes forty different edible species of wild mushrooms found around Illinois and surrounding states, including Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, and Kentucky. With conversational and witty prose, the book provides extensive detail on each edible species, including photographs of potential look-alikes to help you safely identify and avoid poisonous species. Mushroom lovers from Chicago to Cairo will find their favorite local varieties, including morels, chanterelles, boletes, puffballs, and many others. Veteran mushroom hunters Joe McFarland and Gregory M. Mueller also impart their wisdom about the best times and places to find these hidden gems.
Edible Wild Mushrooms of Illinois and Surrounding States also offers practical advice on preparing, storing, drying, and cooking with wild mushrooms, presenting more than two dozen tantalizing mushroom recipes from some of the best restaurants and chefs in Illinois, including one of Food & Wine magazine's top 10 new chefs of 2007. Recipes include classics like Beer Battered Morels, Parasol Mushroom Frittatas, and even the highly improbable (yet delectable) Morel Tiramisu for dessert.
As the first new book about Illinois mushrooms in more than eighty years, this is the guide that mushroom hunters and cooks have been craving.
Visit the book's companion website at www.illinoismushrooms.com.
WINNER, 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year in Traditional Nonfiction!
Chicago’s quirky patron saint
This thrilling story of a daughter of America’s foremost industrialist, John D. Rockefeller, is complete with sex, money, mental illness, and opera divas—and a woman who strove for the independence to make her own choices. Rejecting the limited gender role carved out for her by her father and society, Edith Rockefeller McCormick forged her own path, despite pushback from her family and ultimate financial ruin.
Young Edith and her siblings had access to the best educators in the world, but the girls were not taught how to handle the family money; that responsibility was reserved for their younger brother. A parsimonious upbringing did little to prepare Edith for life after marriage to Harold McCormick, son of the Reaper King Cyrus McCormick. The rich young couple spent lavishly. They purchased treasures like the jewels of Catherine the Great, entertained in grand style in a Chicago mansion, and contributed to the city’s cultural uplift, founding the Chicago Grand Opera. They supported free health care for the poor, founding and supporting the John R. McCormick Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases. Later, Edith donated land for what would become Brookfield Zoo.
Though she lived a seemingly enviable life, Edith’s disposition was ill-suited for the mores of the time. Societal and personal issues—not least of which were the deaths of two of her five children—caused Edith to experience phobias and panic attacks. Dissatisfied with rest cures, she ignored her father’s expectations, moved her family to Zurich, and embarked on a journey of education and self-examination. Edith pursued analysis with then-unknown Carl Jung. Her generosity of spirit led Edith to become Jung’s leading patron. She also supported up-and-coming musicians, artists, and writers, including James Joyce as he wrote Ulysses.
While Edith became a Jungian analyst, her husband, Harold, pursued an affair with an opera star. After returning to Chicago and divorcing Harold, Edith continued to deplete her fortune. She hoped to create something of lasting value, such as a utopian community and affordable homes for the middle class. Edith’s goals caused further difficulties in her relationship with her father and are why he and her brother cut her off from the family funds even after the 1929 stock market crash ruined her. Edith’s death from breast cancer three years later was mourned by thousands of Chicagoans.
Respectful and truthful, Andrea Friederici Ross presents the full arc of this amazing woman’s life and expertly helps readers understand Edith’s generosity, intelligence, and fierce determination to change the world
In 1904, Edmund J. James inherited the leadership of an educational institution in search of an identity. His sixteen-year tenure transformed the University of Illinois from an industrial college to a major state university that fulfilled his vision of a center for scientific investigation.
Winton U. Solberg and J. David Hoeveler provide an account of a pivotal time in the university’s evolution. A gifted intellectual and dedicated academic reformer, James began his tenure facing budget battles and antagonists on the Board of Trustees. But as time passed, he successfully campaigned to address the problems faced by women students, expand graduate programs, solidify finances, create a university press, reshape the library and faculty, and unify the colleges of liberal arts and sciences. Combining narrative force with exhaustive research, the authors illuminate the political milieu and personalities around James to draw a vivid portrait of his life and times.
The authoritative conclusion to a four-part history, Edmund J. James and the Making of the Modern University of Illinois, 1904–1920 tells the story of one man’s mission to create a university worthy of the state of Illinois.
The Illinois frontier offered abundant opportunity, noted English traveler William Oliver after his journey to America in 1841–42, but life there was hard. Accordingly, Oliver advised the wealthy and comfortable to remain in England and counseled the unprosperous to seek their fortunes in America. Written for the poor who would migrate and published in 1843, his Eight Months in Illinois: With Information to Immigrants sought only to provide pertinent, valid, and practical information about what people might encounter in the frontier state. What Oliver actually accomplished, however, was much more: he imparted invaluable insights into and analyses of American life during an era of sweeping social, economic, and political change.
In his new foreword to this edition, James E. Davis stresses Oliver’s sincere desire to help British immigrants succeed in America. Oliver, Davis notes, “devoted dozens of pages of advice on numerous matters: various routes to Illinois and their advantages and disadvantages, processes of settling, qualities of western houses, costs of obtaining a new farm.” Oliver discussed other practical matters, such as the importance of having sons. He also assured his intended readership that “in the West, distinction of classes is little known and seldom recognized.”
As a document covering the middle west in the 1840s, Eight Months in Illinois: With Information to Immigrants has few equals. Its portrayal of farming and trade in relatively primitive times is historically accurate. It paints a plain picture, laying out the essential facts and presenting the typical incidents that enable us to trace the course of a settler’s simple, diligent, laborious day-to-day life. According to Davis, Oliver depicted “accurate and balanced slices of life in Illinois and America, including nasty insects, crude conditions, and the necessity of work.” And he did so without a trace of anti-American bias.
Eight Months in Illinois with Information to Immigrants was reprinted with emendations in 1924 by Walter Hill.
The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a state of emergency unprecedented for most Americans. Some could observe this emergency from the relative safety of their homes, but those in marginalized communities, without access to the same privileges, were forced to risk their health and well-being.
In Emergency, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau documents and theorizes the emergencies of COVID-19 by looking at the experiences of Chicagoans and the policies that shaped their lives. She describes the uneven racial impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx Chicagoans as a crisis within a crisis, caused by a convergence of emergencies: a state of emergency that protected white supremacy and wealth, the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization, and the sacrifice “essential workers” were asked to make to protect the United States economy. As Decoteau shows, the city’s “racial equity” project used data to determine which communities would be given scarce resources, but once positivity or death rates declined, resources were retracted and redistributed elsewhere. City officials thus attempted to manage these converging emergencies by manipulating epidemiological data and orchestrating systems for interpreting that data. Decoteau makes clear that the emergencies precipitated by COVID-19 long predated the pandemic, and that we will continue to live with their compounding crises if we do not tackle their structural underpinnings.
"Chiraq" has come to connote the violence—interpersonal and structural—that many Chicago youth regularly experience. But the contributors to The End of Chiraq show that Chicago is much more than Chiraq. Instead, they demonstrate how young people are thinking and mobilizing, engaged in a process of creating a new and safer world for themselves, their communities, and their city.
In true mixtape fashion, the book is an exercise in "low end theory" that does not just include so-called underground and marginal voices, but foregrounds them. Edited by award-winning poets, writers, and teachers Javon Johnson and Kevin Coval, The End of Chiraq addresses head-on the troublesome relationship between Chicago and Chiraq and envisions a future in which both might be transformed.
Passionate and enlightening, Energy Never Dies uses the power of storytelling to show how optimism and courage fuel the dreams of Black Chicago.
Featuring the work of: About Face Youth Theatre • Albany Park Theater Project • Barrel of Monkeys • Every house has a door • FEMelanin • 500 Clown • Free Street Theater • Honey Pot Performance • Lookingglass Theater • The Neo-Futurists • The Second City • Southside Ignoramus Quartet • Teatro Luna • Walkabout Theater • Young Fugitives
Ensemble-Made Chicago brings together a wide range of Chicago theater companies to share strategies for cocreating performance. Cocreated theater breaks down the traditional roles of writer, director, and performer in favor of a more egalitarian approach in which all participants contribute to the creation of original material. Each chapter offers a short history of a Chicago company, followed by detailed exercises that have been developed and used by that company to build ensemble and generate performances. Companies included range in age from two to fifty years, represent different Chicago neighborhoods, and reflect both the storefront tradition and established cultural institutions. The book pays special attention to the ways the fight for social justice has shaped the development of this aesthetic in Chicago.
Assembled from interviews and firsthand observations, Ensemble-Made Chicago is written in a lively and accessible style and will serve as an invaluable guide for students and practitioners alike, as well as an important archive of Chicago’s vibrant ensemble traditions. Readers will find new creative methods to enrich their own practice and push their work in new directions.
Although the northern Illinois chapters of the story of Susan “Sukey” Richardson’s escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad are documented, the part played by southern Illinois in that historic episode has remained obscure. Carol Pirtle changes that with her investigation into the 1843 suit Andrew Borders lodged against William Hayes, charging his neighbor with helping slaves from the Borders estate escape to Galesburg. In conjunction with her probe into the past, Pirtle also discovered the Hayes correspondence.
Pirtle documents Hayes’s involvement in the Illinois Underground Railroad through approximately two hundred letters received by Hayes from the early 1820s until his death in 1849. Many of these letters specifically corroborate his participation in the escape of slaves from the Borders estate. One such letter came from T. A. Jones in 1843: “You Dear Sir are to me an unknown friend, yet I believe you are a friend to the poor down trodden Slave. This is as good an introduction as I want from any man. My brother, our cause is a holy one.” Letters written by Galesburg residents show that several prominent citizens of that community also assisted in the affair, proving that Knox College administrators and trustees were active in the Underground Railroad.
Pirtle also includes excerpts from the trial transcript from the 1844 civil case against Hayes, which was tried in Pinckneyville, Illinois. She researched newspaper accounts of the event, most notably those in the Western Citizen and the Sparta Herald. Records of the Covenanter Presbyterian church of which Hayes was a member provide partial explanations of Hayes’s motives.
Telling the story of Hayes and his involvement with Susan Richardson and the Underground Railroad, Pirtle provides insight into the work of abolitionists in Illinois. Escape Betwixt Two Suns, in fact, is one of the few books to substantiate the legends of the Underground Railroad. She tells the story of a quiet man who made a difference, of a man deserving the accolades of a hero.
As a public defender, Allen Goodman faced cross-examination from family and friends every day: How could he work to help criminals? How could he live with himself? Presumed guilty by association, Goodman quickly learned that people didn’t really want an answer; they wanted a justification, perhaps even an apology. Ever the idealist, Goodman answered anyway: Everyone deserves justice.
Everyone against Us is Goodman’s testimony of his life as a public defender. In it, he documents his efforts to defend clients, both guilty and innocent, against routine police abuse, prosecutorial misconduct, and unjust sentencing. To work in criminal justice, Goodman shows, is to confront and combat vivid human suffering, of both victims and perpetrators. From sex trafficking, murder, and abuse to false conviction, torture, and systemic racism, Goodman describes the daily experiences that both rattled his worldview and motivated him to work ever harder. Part memoir, part exposé, Everyone against Us is the moving story of an embattled civil servant who staves off the worst abuses of the criminal justice system, at great personal cost.
In 1924, fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks was abducted while walking home from school, killed by a chisel blow to his head, and later found stuffed in a culvert in a marshy wasteland at the Illinois-Indiana state line. Acid had been poured over his naked body. Evil Summer examines the shocking kidnapping and murder of Franks by two University of Chicago students, Nathan “Babe” Leopold and Richard “Dickie” Loeb, both from families of privilege.
In this new examination of the crime, author John Theodore takes readers into the minds of the two criminals as he focuses on three months in 1924. Theodore covers the killing, the confessions, the defense, and the sentencing surrounding the horrific murder, placing the killers’ actions and Clarence Darrow’s historic defense into the context of 1920s Chicago.
Theodore deftly investigates the psychological dimensions of the crime, revealing the murderers’ fantasies, relationships, sexuality, and motives. The author examines the killers’ past, outlining Loeb’s obsession with detective fiction and crime and his editorial on random killing—written at age nine—and Leopold’s nightly master-slave fantasies and fascination with Nietzsche.
Evil Summer, which includes twenty-three illustrations, meticulously traces the murder from inception to confession, including such details as the special-delivery ransom letter sent to Jacob Franks and the discovery of Leopold’s horn-rimmed eyeglasses lying on a railroad embankment near Bobby’s dead body. Theodore re-creates such scenes as the convergence of hundreds of people in front of the Franks home, Bobby’s body lying in a small white casket in the library, and Loeb being voyeuristically drawn to the home while Bobby’s classmates carry the casket to the hearse.
Worldwide press coverage reflected the public fascination with the case in what was then called “the trial of the century.” The story became a media circus: Chicago’s six daily newspapers battled vigorously for readers, two Daily News cub reporters became part of the story, and the Chicago Tribune carried a voting ballot asking readers whether radio station WGN should broadcast the courtroom spectacle. The changing drama was delivered to Chicagoans every morning and evening, and the public feasted on every press run.
More than a crime story, Evil Summer illuminates the dark side of American life in the 1920s, including the excesses of privileged youth, the troubled childhoods, the random victimization, the anti-Semitism, and the sexuality.
Drawing from the headlines, Exit Strategy is set in Chicago and tells the story of a fictional public high school slated for closure at the end of the year. Despite funding cuts, bureaucrats run amok, apathy, and a rodent infestation, a small, multiracial group of teachers launch a last-minute effort to save the school, and put their careers, futures, and safety in the hands of a fast-talking administrator who may be in over his head. The tenuous situation also raises fears and anxieties among students, and within the volcanic neighborhood that is home to the school.
Holter has said that Exit Strategy was inspired by the 2013 mass closure of forty-nine Chicago public schools, which displaced nearly 12,000 children—the majority of directly impacted students were African American and Latinx. Hailed as "riveting," "sharp," and "richly metaphoric" by critics, the play indicts how we educate our children in big American cities, and shows why gaps between haves and have-nots continue to grow.
Exit Strategy is one of seven plays in Ike Holter's cycle of works set in Chicago or Chicago-inspired neighborhoods.
In 1980, Christine J. Walley’s world was turned upside down when the steel mill in Southeast Chicago where her father worked abruptly closed. In the ensuing years, ninety thousand other area residents would also lose their jobs in the mills—just one example of the vast scale of deindustrialization occurring across the United States. The disruption of this event propelled Walley into a career as a cultural anthropologist, and now, in Exit Zero, she brings her anthropological perspective home, examining the fate of her family and that of blue-collar America at large.
This book is part of a project that also includes a documentary film.
From the colorful variety of birds at War Bluff Valley Audubon Sanctuary to the exposed bedrock and cliff faces of Apple River Canyon, Exploring Nature in Illinois will inspire readers to explore wonders hidden from urban sprawl and cultivated farmland. Maps and descriptions help travelers access even hard-to-find sites while a wealth of detail and photography offers nature-lovers insights into the flora, fauna, and other aspects of vibrant settings and ecosystems. The authors also include diary entries describing their own impressions of and engagement with the sites.
A unique and much-needed reference, Exploring Nature in Illinois will entertain and enlighten hikers, cyclers, students and scouts, morning walkers, weekend drivers, and anyone else seeking to get back to nature in the Prairie State.
Discovering Illinois through twenty of the state's most important places
A one-of-a-kind travel guide, Exploring the Land of Lincoln invites road-trippers and history buffs to explore the Prairie State's most extraordinary historic sites. Charles Titus blends storytelling with in-depth research to highlight twenty must-see destinations selected for human drama, historical and cultural relevance, and their far-reaching impact on the state and nation. Maps, illustrations, and mileage tables encourage readers to create personal journeys of exploration to, and beyond, places like Cahokia, the Lincoln sites, Nauvoo, and Chicago's South Side Community Art Center.
Detailed and user-friendly, Exploring the Land of Lincoln is the only handbook you need for the sights and stories behind the names on the map of Illinois.
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