front cover of Hack
Hack
Stories from a Chicago Cab
Dmitry Samarov
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Cabdrivers and their yellow taxis are as much a part of the cityscape as the high-rise buildings and the subway. We hail them without thought after a wearying day at the office or an exuberant night on the town. And, undoubtedly, taxi drivers have stories to tell—of farcical local politics, of colorful passengers, of changing neighborhoods and clandestine shortcuts. No one knows a city’s streets—and thus its heart—better than its cabdrivers. And from behind the wheel of his taxi, Dmitry Samarov has seen more of Chicago than most Chicagoans will hope to experience in a lifetime.

An artist and painter trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Samarov began driving a cab in 1993 to make ends meet, and he’s been working as a taxi driver ever since. In Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab, he recounts tales that will delight, surprise, and sometimes shock the most seasoned urbanite. We follow Samarov through the rhythms of a typical week, as he waits hours at the garage to pick up a shift, ferries comically drunken passengers between bars, delivers prostitutes to their johns, and inadvertently observes drug deals. There are long waits with other cabbies at O’Hare, vivid portraits of street corners and their regular denizens, amorous Cubs fans celebrating after a game at Wrigley Field, and customers who are pleasantly surprised that Samarov is white—and tell him so. Throughout, Samarov’s own drawings—of his fares, of the taxi garage, and of a variety of Chicago street scenes—accompany his stories. In the grand tradition of Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Mike Royko, and Studs Terkel, Dmitry Samarov has rendered an entertaining, poignant, and unforgettable vision of Chicago and its people.
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Harold!
Photographs from the Harold Washington Years
Photographs by Antonio Dickey and Marc PoKempner, text by Salim Muwakkil
Northwestern University Press, 2007
This handsome book captures in words and pictures the powerful emotions that circled around one man in Chicago in the early 1980’s: Harold Washington. More than one hundred pictures, from candid shots on the campaign trail to triumphant public appearances, give readers a window onto a man who won over an entire city. Washington’s mayoral win represented a faltering of the previously all-powerful Chicago Machine, and his campaign was a part of a larger civil rights crusade that forged unity in the black community in Chicago.

Antonio Dickey and Marc PoKempner were there with Washington throughout 1982-87, Dickey as his campaign and personal photographer and PoKempner on assignment for the New York Times, People, and Time, capturing the force of his personality and the inspiration he brought to Chicago. Their photographs have become the definitive documentation of the Harold years and were featured in the Chicago Historical Society’s 2003–2004 exhibit “Harold Washington: The Man and the Movement.” They were there for his underdog rise, his win, his first term, and his untimely death just seven months into his second term. The year 2007 marks the twentieth anniversary of Washington’s death, and this loving tribute in words and pictures will keep his message alive for future generations.
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The Hayloft Gang
The Story of the National Barn Dance
Edited by Chad Berry
University of Illinois Press, 2007
The National Barn Dance was the nation's most popular country music radio show during the 1930s and 1940s. The pioneering radio program defined country and western entertainment until the Grand Ole Opry and rock 'n' roll supplanted it in the 1950s. Broadcast for more than three decades from Chicago on WLS's powerful 50,000-watt signal, the show reached listeners throughout the Midwest, the East Coast, and South, delivering popular entertainment to both rural and urban areas while celebrating the fading folk traditions of an increasingly urbanized America.

The Hayloft Gang draws on the colorful commentary of performers and former listeners to analyze the National Barn Dance, its audience, and its impact. Contributors trace the history of barn dance radio, explore the paradox of a foundational country music program broadcast from a major city, investigate notions of authenticity in the presentation of country music and entertainment, and delve into provocative issues raised by the barn dance phenomenon.

Contributors: Chad Berry, Michael T. Bertrand, Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Don Cusic, Wayne W. Daniel, Loyal Jones, Kristine M. McCusker, Stephen Parry, Susan Smulyan, Paul L. Tyler, and Michael Ann Williams.

[more]

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The Haymarket Conspiracy
Transatlantic Anarchist Networks
Timothy Messer-Kruse
University of Illinois Press, 2012
The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks traces the evolution of revolutionary anarchist ideas in Europe and their migration to the United States in the 1880s. A new history of the transatlantic origins of American anarchism, this study thoroughly debunks the dominant narrative through which most historians interpret the Haymarket Bombing and Trial of 1886–87.
 
Challenging the view that there was no evidence connecting the eight convicted workers to the bomb throwing at the Haymarket rally, Timothy Messer-Kruse examines police investigations and trial proceedings that reveal the hidden transatlantic networks, the violent subculture, and the misunderstood beliefs of Gilded Age anarchists. Messer-Kruse documents how, in the 1880s, radicals on both sides of the Atlantic came to celebrate armed struggle as the one true way forward and began to prepare seriously for conflict. Within this milieu, he suggests the possibility of a "Haymarket conspiracy": a coordinated plan of attack in which the oft-martyred Haymarket radicals in fact posed a real threat to public order and safety. Drawing on new, never-before published historical evidence, The Haymarket Conspiracy provides a new means of understanding the revolutionary anarchist movement on its own terms rather than in the romantic ways in which its agents have been eulogized.
[more]

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Heat Wave
A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
Eric Klinenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2015
"A classic. I can't recommend it enough."--Chris Hayes

On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index, which measures how the temperature actually feels on the body, would hit 126 degrees by the time the day was over. Meteorologists had been warning residents about a two-day heat wave, but these temperatures did not end that soon. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; the records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. And by July 20, over seven hundred people had perished-more than twice the number that died in the Chicago Fire of 1871, twenty times the number of those struck by Hurricane Andrew in 1992—in the great Chicago heat wave, one of the deadliest in American history.

Heat waves in the United States kill more people during a typical year than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources of the city's vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a "social autopsy," examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been.

Starting with the question of why so many people died at home alone, Klinenberg investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how the city government responded to the crisis, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported on and explained these events. Through a combination of years of fieldwork, extensive interviews, and archival research, Klinenberg uncovers how a number of surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdown—including the literal and social isolation of seniors, the institutional abandonment of poor neighborhoods, and the retrenchment of public assistance programs—contributed to the high fatality rates. The human catastrophe, he argues, cannot simply be blamed on the failures of any particular individuals or organizations. For when hundreds of people die behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community groups, and public agencies, everyone is implicated in their demise.

As Klinenberg demonstrates in this incisive and gripping account of the contemporary urban condition, the widening cracks in the social foundations of American cities that the 1995 Chicago heat wave made visible have by no means subsided as the temperatures returned to normal. The forces that affected Chicago so disastrously remain in play in America's cities, and we ignore them at our peril.

For the Second Edition Klinenberg has added a new Preface showing how climate change has made extreme weather events in urban centers a major challenge for cities and nations across our planet, one that will require commitment to climate-proofing changes to infrastructure rather than just relief responses.
[more]

front cover of Heat Wave
Heat Wave
A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
Eric Klinenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2002
On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index, which measures how the temperature actually feels on the body, would hit 126 degrees by the time the day was over. Meteorologists had been warning residents about a two-day heat wave, but these temperatures did not end that soon. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; the records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. And by July 20, over seven hundred people had perished-more than twice the number that died in the Chicago Fire of 1871, twenty times the number of those struck by Hurricane Andrew in 1992—in the great Chicago heat wave, one of the deadliest in American history.

Heat waves in the United States kill more people during a typical year than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources of the city's vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a "social autopsy," examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been.

Starting with the question of why so many people died at home alone, Klinenberg investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how the city government responded to the crisis, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported on and explained these events. Through a combination of years of fieldwork, extensive interviews, and archival research, Klinenberg uncovers how a number of surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdown—including the literal and social isolation of seniors, the institutional abandonment of poor neighborhoods, and the retrenchment of public assistance programs—contributed to the high fatality rates. The human catastrophe, he argues, cannot simply be blamed on the failures of any particular individuals or organizations. For when hundreds of people die behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community groups, and public agencies, everyone is implicated in their demise.

As Klinenberg demonstrates in this incisive and gripping account of the contemporary urban condition, the widening cracks in the social foundations of American cities that the 1995 Chicago heat wave made visible have by no means subsided as the temperatures returned to normal. The forces that affected Chicago so disastrously remain in play in America's cities, and we ignore them at our peril.
[more]

front cover of Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago
Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago
Architecture, Institutions, and the Making of a Modern Metropolis
Edward W. Wolner
University of Chicago Press, 2011

When championing the commercial buildings and homes that made the Windy City famous, one can’t help but mention the brilliant names of their architects—Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. But few people are aware of Henry Ives Cobb (1859–1931), the man responsible for an extraordinarily rich chapter in the city’s turn-of-the-century building boom, and fewer still realize Cobb’s lasting importance as a designer of the private and public institutions that continue to enrich Chicago’s exceptional architectural heritage.

Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is the first book about this distinguished architect and the magnificent buildings he created, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Athletic Association, the Fisheries Building for the 1893 World’s Fair, and the Chicago Federal Building. Cobb filled a huge institutional void with his inventive Romanesque and Gothic buildings—something that the other architect-giants, occupied largely with residential and commercial work, did not do. Edward W. Wolner argues that these constructions and the enterprises they housed—including the first buildings and master plan for the University of Chicago—signaled that the city had come of age, that its leaders were finally pursuing the highest ambitions in the realms of culture and intellect.

Assembling a cast of colorful characters from a free-wheeling age gone by, and including over 140 images of Cobb’s most creative buildings, Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is a rare achievement: a dynamic portrait of an architect whose institutional designs decisively changed the city’s identity during its most critical phase of development.

[more]

front cover of The Hidden War
The Hidden War
Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago
Popkin, Susan J
Rutgers University Press, 2000

Since the late 1970s, the high-rise developments of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) have been dominated by gang violence and drugs, creating a sense of hopelessness among residents. Despite a lengthy war on crime, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, the CHA has been unable to reduce the violence that makes life intolerable. Focusing on three developments—Rockwell Gardens, Henry Horner Homes, and Harold Ickes Homes—Sue Popkin and her co-authors interview residents, community leaders, and CHA staff. The Hidden War chronicles the many failed efforts of the CHA to combat crime and improve its developments, offering a vivid portrait of what life is like when lived among bullets, graffiti, and broken plumbing.

Most families living in these developments are headed by African American single mothers. The authors reveal the dilemmas facing women and children who are often victims or witnesses of violent crime, and yet are dependent on the perpetrators and their drug-dominant economy. The CHA—plagued by financial scandals, managerial incompetence, and inconsistent funding—is no match for thegang-dominated social order. Even well-intentioned initiatives such as the recent effort to demolish and “revitalize” the worst developments seem to be ineffective at combating crime, while the drastic changes leave many vulnerable families facing an uncertain future. The Hidden War sends a humbling message to policy makers and prognosticators who claim to know the right way to “solve poverty.”

[more]

front cover of A History of Chicago, Volume I
A History of Chicago, Volume I
The Beginning of a City 1673-1848
Bessie Louise Pierce
University of Chicago Press, 1937
The first major history of Chicago ever written, A History of Chicago covers the city’s great history over two centuries, from 1673 to 1893.

Originally conceived as a centennial history of Chicago, the project became, under the guidance of renowned historian Bessie Louise Pierce, a definitive, three-volume set describing the city’s growth—from its humble frontier beginnings to the horrors of the Great Fire, the construction of some of the world’s first skyscrapers, and the opulence of the 1893 World’s Fair. Pierce and her assistants spent over forty years transforming historical records into an inspiring human story of growth and survival.

Rich with anecdotal evidence and interviews with the men and women who made Chicago great, all three volumes will now be available for the first time in years. A History of Chicago will be essential reading for anyone who wants to know this great city and its place in America.

“With this rescue of its history from the bright, impressionable newspapermen and from the subscription-volumes, Chicago builds another impressive memorial to its coming of age, the closing of its first ‘century of progress.’”—E. D. Branch, New York Times (1937)

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front cover of A History of Chicago, Volume II
A History of Chicago, Volume II
From Town to City 1848-1871
Bessie Louise Pierce
University of Chicago Press, 1940
The first major history of Chicago ever written, A History of Chicago covers the city’s great history over two centuries, from 1673 to 1893.

Originally conceived as a centennial history of Chicago, the project became, under the guidance of renowned historian Bessie Louise Pierce, a definitive, three-volume set describing the city’s growth—from its humble frontier beginnings to the horrors of the Great Fire, the construction of some of the world’s first skyscrapers, and the opulence of the 1893 World’s Fair. Pierce and her assistants spent over forty years transforming historical records into an inspiring human story of growth and survival.

Rich with anecdotal evidence and interviews with the men and women who made Chicago great, all three volumes will now be available for the first time in years. A History of Chicago will be essential reading for anyone who wants to know this great city and its place in America.

“With this rescue of its history from the bright, impressionable newspapermen and from the subscription-volumes, Chicago builds another impressive memorial to its coming of age, the closing of its first ‘century of progress.’”—E. D. Branch, New York Times (1937)


[more]

front cover of History of Chicago, Volume III
History of Chicago, Volume III
The Rise of a Modern City, 1871-1893
Bessie Louise Pierce
University of Chicago Press, 1957
The first major history of Chicago ever written, A History of Chicago covers the city’s great history over two centuries, from 1673 to 1893.

Originally conceived as a centennial history of Chicago, the project became, under the guidance of renowned historian Bessie Louise Pierce, a definitive, three-volume set describing the city’s growth—from its humble frontier beginnings to the horrors of the Great Fire, the construction of some of the world’s first skyscrapers, and the opulence of the 1893 World’s Fair. Pierce and her assistants spent over forty years transforming historical records into an inspiring human story of growth and survival.

Rich with anecdotal evidence and interviews with the men and women who made Chicago great, all three volumes will now be available for the first time in years. A History of Chicago will be essential reading for anyone who wants to know this great city and its place in America.

“With this rescue of its history from the bright, impressionable newspapermen and from the subscription-volumes, Chicago builds another impressive memorial to its coming of age, the closing of its first ‘century of progress.’”—E. D. Branch, New York Times (1937)

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
The History of Development of Building Construction in Chicago
Frank A. Randall
University of Illinois Press, 1999
Long regarded as the definitive catalog of Chicago architecture, The History of the Development of Building Construction in Chicago is a treasure trove of architectural and engineering information about buildings in Chicago's central business and residential district.
 
Generations have relied on the Randall book as the most authoritative and comprehensive guide to buildings in the Chicago central area. This edition is updated with information about fifty additional buildings from the time frame of the original text, 1830-1949; new data for four hundred buildings from the period 1950-98; and a number of additional plates from the rare Rand McNally Views of Chicago.
 
The second edition of The History of the Development of Building Construction in Chicago is a tribute to Frank Randall's vision and an indispensable resource to Chicago area architects, engineers, preservation specialists, and other members of the building industry.
 
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A History of the Chicago Portage
The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America
Benjamin Sells
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Seven muddy miles transformed a region and a nation

This fascinating account explores the significance of the Chicago Portage, one of the most important—and neglected—sites in early US history. A seven-mile-long strip of marsh connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, the portage was inhabited by the earliest indigenous people in the Midwest and served as a major trade route for Native American tribes. A link between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, the Chicago Portage was a geopolitically significant resource that the French, British, and US governments jockeyed to control. Later, it became a template for some of the most significant waterways created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The portage gave Chicago its name and spurred the city’s success—and is the reason why the metropolis is located in Illinois, not Wisconsin.
 
A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America is the definitive story of a national landmark.
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A Home of Another Kind
One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare
Kenneth Cmiel
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In the most comprehensive account ever written of an American orphanage, an institution about which even its many new advocates and experts know little, Kenneth Cmiel exposes America's changing attitudes toward child welfare.

The book begins with the fascinating history of the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum from 1860 through 1984, when it became a full-time research institute. Founded by a group of wealthy volunteers, the asylum was a Protestant institution for Protestant children—one of dozens around the country designed as places where single parents could leave their children if they were temporarily unable to care for them.

But the asylum, which later became known as Chapin Hall, changed dramatically over the years as it tried to respond to changing policies, priorities, regulations, and theories concerning child welfare. Cmiel offers a vivid portrait of how these changes affected the day-to-day realities of group living. How did the kind of care given to the children change? What did the staff and management hope to accomplish? How did they define "family"? Who were the children who lived in the asylum? What brought them there? What were their needs? How did outside forces change what went on inside Chapin Hall?

This is much more than a richly detailed account of one institution. Cmiel shatters a number of popular myths about orphanages. Few realize that almost all children living in nineteenth-century orphanages had at least one living parent. And the austere living conditions so characteristic of the orphanage were prompted as much by health concerns as by strict Victorian morals.
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Honor and the American Dream
Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community
Horowitz, Ruth
Rutgers University Press, 1983
Thirty-second Street in Chicago. A Chicano community, peaceful on a warm summer night, residents socializing, children playing--and gang warfare ready to explode at any time. Ruth Horowitz takes us to the heart of this world, one characterized by opposing sets of values. On the one hand, residents believe in hard work, education, family ties, and the American dream of success. On the other hand, gang members are preoccupied with fighting to maintain their personal and family honor. Horowitz gives us an inside look at this world, showing us how the juxtaposition of two worlds--the streets and the social ladder--and two cultures, Mexican and American, constantly challenges the residents of the community.
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A House for the Struggle
The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago
E. James West
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Multiple Award-Winner!
  • Winner of the 2023 Michael Nelson Prize of International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST)
  • Recipient of the 2022 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award
  • Winner of the 2023 American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year
  • Winner of the 2023 ULCC’s (Union League Club of Chicago) Outstanding Book on the History of Chicago Award
  • Recipient of a 2023 Best of Illinois History Superior Achievement award from the Illinois State Historical Society
  • Winner of the 2023 BAAS Book Prize (British Association for American Studies)
  • Winner of a 2023 The Brinck Book Award and Lecture series (University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning)
  • Honorable Mention for the 2021-22 RSAP Book Prize (Research Society for American Periodicals)

Buildings once symbolized Chicago's place as the business capital of Black America and a thriving hub for Black media. In this groundbreaking work, E. James West examines the city's Black press through its relationship with the built environment. As a house for the struggle, the buildings of publications like Ebony and the Chicago Defender embodied narratives of racial uplift and community resistance. As political hubs, gallery spaces, and public squares, they served as key sites in the ongoing Black quest for self-respect, independence, and civic identity. At the same time, factors ranging from discriminatory business practices to editorial and corporate ideology prescribed their location, use, and appearance, positioning Black press buildings as sites of both Black possibility and racial constraint.

Engaging and innovative, A House for the Struggle reconsiders the Black press's place at the crossroads where aspiration collided with life in one of America's most segregated cities.

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Hull-House Maps and Papers
A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions
By Residents of Hull-House
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Inspired by their Progressive Era faith in social science solutions to society’s problems, the residents of Hull-House collaborated on this work of sociology based on their experiences as residents of Chicago’s Near West Side. The contributors to this book believed that an enlightened citizenry could be mobilized for reform, and that by publishing maps with explicit information about the wages and conditions of the working poor in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward they would educate the public and inspire reforms.

In addition to Jane Addams’s own prefatory note and paper on the role of social settlements in the labor movement, contributors provided detailed, real-world analyses of the Chicago Jewish ghetto, garment workers and the sweatshops, child labor, immigrant neighborhoods in the vicinity of Hull-House, and local charities. This edition also contains eight color reproductions of the original Hull-House neighborhood maps.  The year 2006 marks the one hundred and eleventh anniversary of the publication of Hull-House Maps and Papers, and the volume remains a dramatic statement about the residents’ shared values as well as a major influence on subsequent social surveys. 

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Hutchins' University
A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929-1950
William H. McNeill
University of Chicago Press, 1991
The inauguration of Robert Maynard Hutchins as the fifth President of the University of Chicago in 1929 coincided with a drastically changed social and economic climate throughout the world. And Hutchins himself opened an era of tumultuous reform and debate within the University. In the midst of the changes Hutchins started and the intense feelings they stirred, William H. McNeill arrived at the University to pursue his education. In Hutchins' University he tells what it was like to come of age as a undergraduate in those heady times.

Hutchins' scathing opposition to the departmentalization of learning and his resounding call for reforms in general education sparked controversy and fueled debate on campus and off. It became a struggle for the heart and soul of higher education—and McNeill, as a student and then as an instructor, was a participant. His account of the university's history is laced with personal reminiscences, encounters with influential fellow scholars such as Richard McKeon, R. S. Crane, and David Daiches, and details drawn from Hutchins' papers and other archives.

McNeill sketches the interplay of personalities with changing circumstances of the Depression, war, and postwar eras. But his central concern is with the institutional life of the University, showing how student behavior, staff and faculty activity and even the Hyde Park neighborhood all revolved around the charismatic figure of Robert Maynard Hutchins—shaped by him and in reaction against him.

Successive transformations of the College, and the tribulations of the ideal of general or liberal education are central to much of the story; but the memoir also explores how the University was affected by such events as Red scares, the remarkably successful Round Table radio broadcasts, the
abolition of big time football, and the inauguration of the nuclear age under the west stands of Stagg Field in 1942.

In short, Hutchins' University sketches an extraordinarily vibrant period for the University of Chicago
and for American higher education. It will revive old controversies among veterans from those times, and may provoke others to reflect anew about the proper role of higher education in American society.
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