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I Came a Stranger
The Story of a Hull-House Girl
Hilda Satt Polacheck
University of Illinois Press, 1989
Hilda Satt Polacheck's family emigrated from Poland to Chicago in 1892, bringing their old-world Jewish traditions with them into the Industrial Age. Throughout her career as a writer and activist, Polacheck never forgot the immigrant neighborhoods, markets, and scents and sounds of Chicago's West Side. In charming and colorful prose, Polacheck recounts her introduction to American life and the Hull-House community; her chance meeting with Jane Addams and their subsequent long friendship and working relationship; her marriage; her support of civil rights and women's suffrage; her work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; and her experiences as a writer for the Works Progress Administration.
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The Idea and Practice of General Education
An Account of the College of the University of Chicago
The College of the University of Chicago
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Written by members of the faculty at the College of the University of Chicago, this book provides a comprehensive account of one of the most significant and successful experiments in the field of education. In 1931, the faculty undertook to determine the essentials of a general education and to devise an integrated system of essential courses that students were required to take. This book discusses that innovative curriculum and method, and includes reading lists and sample examinations. Levine's new Preface discusses the endurance of and excitement surrounding the program created during the Hutchins years.
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Illegal
Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant
Jose Angel N.
University of Illinois Press, 2014
A day after José Ángel N. first crossed the United States border from Mexico, he was caught and then released onto the streets of Tijuana. Undeterred, N. crawled back through a tunnel to San Diego, where he entered the United States to stay. Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant is his timely and compelling memoir of building a new life in America.

Arriving in the 1990s with a ninth grade education, N. traveled to Chicago where he found access to ESL and GED classes. He eventually attended college and graduate school and became a professional translator.

Despite having a well-paying job, N. was isolated by a lack of legal documentation. Travel concerns made promotions impossible. The simple act of purchasing his girlfriend a beer at a Cubs baseball game caused embarrassment and shame when N. couldn't produce a valid ID. A frustrating contradiction, N. lived in a luxury high-rise condo but couldn't fully live the American dream. He did, however, find solace in the one gift America gave him–-his education. Ultimately, N.'s is the story of the triumph of education over adversity. In Illegal, he debunks the stereotype that undocumented immigrants are freeloaders without access to education or opportunity for advancement. With bravery and honesty, N. details the constraints, deceptions, and humiliations that characterize alien life "amid the shadows."

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An Illini Place
Building the University of Illinois Campus
Incoronata Inserra
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Why does the University of Illinois campus at Urbana-Champaign look as it does today? Drawing on a wealth of research and featuring more than one hundred color photographs, An Illini Place provides an engrossing and beautiful answer to that question. Lex Tate and John Franch trace the story of the university's evolution through its buildings. Oral histories, official reports, dedication programs, and developmental plans both practical and quixotic inform the story. The authors also provide special chapters on campus icons and on the buildings, arenas and other spaces made possible by donors and friends of the university. Adding to the experience is a web companion that includes profiles of the planners, architects, and presidents instrumental in the campus's growth, plus an illustrated inventory of current and former campus plans and buildings.
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Illinois
A History
Richard J. Jensen
University of Illinois Press, 1978
The epic struggle between traditional, agrarian society and modern industrial capitalism was played out on the national stage as the War between the States. The same struggle between traditional and modern values split Illinois between "Egypt"--the southern region populated by yeoman farmers who came to Illinois from Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, and other southern states--and the Yankee-dominated, urban north.
 
Richard J. Jensen treats Illinois as a microcosm of the nation, arguing that its history exhibits basic conflicts that had much to do with shaping American society in general. Northern reformers in Illinois were intent on remaking the state in their image: middle-class, egalitarian, urban, and progressive. These values clashed with the patriarchal supremacy and intense loyalty to kin and ken by which the people of southern Illinois, and the South, organized their lives.
 
When the Civil War broke out, sympathy for the Confederacy ran high in southern Illinois. Although the region officially supported the Union, guerrilla bands terrorized Unionists, and in Charleston a full-scale riot against Federal troops erupted in 1864. The Union victory decisively shifted both the nation and Illinois toward faster modernization. Violence became more bureaucratized, and localism eroded with the onslaught of chain franchises, consolidated schools, and homogenized suburbs. Jensen extends his discussion to the emergence of newer, postmodern conflicts that continue to occupy the people of Illinois.
 
Without neglecting the high-profile individuals and events that put the Prairie State on the map, Jensen offers an innovative, wide-angle view that expands our perspective on Illinois history.
 
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Illinois
Crossroads of a Continent
Lois A. Carrier
University of Illinois Press, 1993
With a major port on the Great Lakes, an extensive network of railroads and canals, and a river system including the Mississippi, the Illinois, and the Ohio, Illinois has long played a critical role in linking East Coast industrial cities, the agricultural heartland, and the Gulf Coast.

Writing in a fast-paced, down-to-earth style, Lois Carrier introduces a host of innovations and innovators associated with Illinois: Jane Addams and Louis Armstrong, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walt Disney, Cracker Jack and the Ferris wheel. From the Cahokia Mounds to Chicago, Illinois: Crossroads of a Continent provides a panoramic history for students and general readers.

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Illinois History
A Reader
Edited by Mark Hubbard: A collection of articles from the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
University of Illinois Press, 2018
A renaissance in Illinois history scholarship has sparked renewed interest in the Prairie State's storied past. Students, meanwhile, continue to pursue coursework in Illinois history to fulfill degree requirements and for their own edification.
 
This Common Threads collection offers important articles from the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. Organized as an approachable survey of state history, the book offers chapters that cover the colonial era, early statehood, the Civil War years, the Gilded Age and Progressive eras, World War II, and postwar Illinois. The essays reflect the wide range of experiences lived by Illinoisans engaging in causes like temperance and women's struggle for a shorter workday; facing challenges that range from the rise of street gangs to Decatur's urban decline; and navigating historic issues like the 1822-24 constitutional crisis and the Alton School Case.
 
Contributors: Roger Biles, Lilia Fernandez, Paul Finkelman, Raymond E. Hauser, Reginald Horsman, Suellen Hoy, Judson Jeffries, Lionel Kimble Jr., Thomas E. Pegram, Shirley Portwood, Robert D. Sampson, Ronald E. Shaw, and Robert M. Sutton.
 
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Illinois in the Civil War
Victor Hicken
University of Illinois Press, 1991
Victor Hicken tells the richly detailed story of the common soldiers who marched from Illinois to fight and die on Civil War battlefields. The second edition of the 1966 classic includes a new preface, twenty-four illustrations, and a twenty-five-page addendum to the bibliography that provides many new sources of information on Illinois regiments.
 
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Illinois in the War of 1812
Gillum Ferguson
University of Illinois Press, 2012

 Russell P. Strange "Book of the Year" Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2012.

On the eve of the War of 1812, the Illinois Territory was a new land of bright promise. Split off from Indiana Territory in 1809, the new territory ran from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers north to the U.S. border with Canada, embracing the current states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and a part of Michigan. The extreme southern part of the region was rich in timber, but the dominant feature of the landscape was the vast tall grass prairie that stretched without major interruption from Lake Michigan for more than three hundred miles to the south. The territory was largely inhabited by Indians: Sauk, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and others. By 1812, however, pioneer farmers had gathered in the wooded fringes around prime agricultural land, looking out over the prairies with longing and trepidation.
 
Six years later, a populous Illinois was confident enough to seek and receive admission as a state in the Union. What had intervened was the War of 1812, in which white settlers faced both Indians resistant to their encroachments and British forces poised to seize control of the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes. The war ultimately broke the power and morale of the Indian tribes and deprived them of the support of their ally, Great Britain. Sometimes led by skillful tacticians, at other times by blundering looters who got lost in the tall grass, the combatants showed each other little mercy. Until and even after the war was concluded by the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, there were massacres by both sides, laying the groundwork for later betrayal of friendly and hostile tribes alike and for ultimate expulsion of the Indians from the new state of Illinois.
 
In this engrossing new history, published upon the war's bicentennial, Gillum Ferguson underlines the crucial importance of the War of 1812 in the development of Illinois as a state. The history of Illinois in the War of 1812 has never before been told with so much attention to the personalities who fought it, the events that defined it, and its lasting consequences.
 
Endorsed by the Illinois Society of the War of 1812 and the Illinois War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission.
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Illinois Insects and Spiders
Paintings by Peggy Macnamara
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Recent estimates put the world's insect population at more than forty million species. Here in Illinois, the numbers are equally awesome: seventeen thousand species call the state home, among them four thousand types of flies; fifteen hundred types of grasshoppers, cicadas, and aphids; five thousand types of beetles; two hundred types of ants, wasps, and bees; and two thousand types of butterflies and moths. With so much entomological diversity here in the Midwest, Illinois residents needn't look further than their own backyards to discover the rich and secret world of insects and spiders.

Marrying art and entomology, Illinois Insects and Spiders is a unique introduction to local biodiversity. Artist Peggy Macnamara celebrates the state's burgeoning insect and spider populations with twenty-seven color plates of beautiful renderings of numerous species, organized both taxonomically and thematically. The insects on each plate are depicted true to scale in relation to one another and are displayed approximately ten times larger than life size. Accompanying each plate are lively captions-written by Field Museum curators and collection managers-that identify the species and reveal their interesting behaviors and unique habitats.

Illinois Insects and Spiders encourages readers to explore the biodiversity at their feet-in the shiny beetles on the ground-and in the air-in the glint of a lightning bug in summer. More than a traditional field guide, Illinois Insects and Spiders is the rare book that combines lush artwork with the science of natural history, bringing both closer to the general reader.
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Illinois Justice
The Scandal of 1969 and the Rise of John Paul Stevens
Kenneth A. Manaster
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Illinois political scandals reached new depths in the 1960s and ’70s. In Illinois Justice, Kenneth Manaster takes us behind the scenes of one of the most spectacular. The so-called Scandal of 1969 not only ended an Illinois Supreme Court justice’s aspirations to the US Supreme Court, but also marked the beginning of little-known lawyer John Paul Stevens’s rise to the high court.

In 1969, citizen gadfly Sherman Skolnick accused two Illinois Supreme Court justices of accepting valuable bank stock from an influential Chicago lawyer in exchange for deciding an important case in the lawyer’s favor. The resulting feverish media coverage prompted the state supreme court to appoint a special commission to investigate. Within six weeks and on a shoestring budget, the commission mobilized a small volunteer staff to reveal the facts. Stevens, then a relatively unknown Chicago lawyer, served as chief counsel. His work on this investigation would launch him into the public spotlight and onto the bench.

Manaster, who served on the commission, tells the real story of the investigation, detailing the dead ends, tactics, and triumphs. Manaster expertly traces Stevens’s masterful courtroom strategies and vividly portrays the high-profile personalities involved, as well as the subtleties of judicial corruption. A reflective foreword by Justice Stevens himself looks back at the case and how it influenced his career.

Now the subject of the documentary Unexpected Justice: The Rise of John Paul Stevens, Manaster’s book is both a fascinating chapter of political history and a revealing portrait of the early career of a Supreme Court justice.
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Illinois Justice
The Scandal of 1969 and the Rise of John Paul Stevens
Kenneth A. Manaster
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Illinois political scandals reached new depths in the 1960s and ’70s. In Illinois Justice, Kenneth Manaster takes us behind the scenes of one of the most spectacular. The so-called Scandal of 1969 not only ended an Illinois Supreme Court justice’s aspirations to the US Supreme Court, but also marked the beginning of little-known lawyer John Paul Stevens’s rise to the high court.

In 1969, citizen gadfly Sherman Skolnick accused two Illinois Supreme Court justices of accepting valuable bank stock from an influential Chicago lawyer in exchange for deciding an important case in the lawyer’s favor. The resulting feverish media coverage prompted the state supreme court to appoint a special commission to investigate. Within six weeks and on a shoestring budget, the commission mobilized a small volunteer staff to reveal the facts. Stevens, then a relatively unknown Chicago lawyer, served as chief counsel. His work on this investigation would launch him into the public spotlight and onto the bench.

Manaster, who served on the commission, tells the real story of the investigation, detailing the dead ends, tactics, and triumphs. Manaster expertly traces Stevens’s masterful courtroom strategies and vividly portrays the high-profile personalities involved, as well as the subtleties of judicial corruption. A reflective foreword by Justice Stevens himself looks back at the case and how it influenced his career.

Now the subject of the documentary Unexpected Justice: The Rise of John Paul Stevens, this fascinating chapter of political history offers a revealing portrait of the early career of a Supreme Court justice.
[more]

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Illinois Politics
A Citizen's Guide
James D. Nowlan, Samuel K. Gove, and Richard J. Winkel
University of Illinois Press, 2010
Considered a microcosm of the nation, the state of Illinois stretches almost four hundred miles from its northern limit at the Wisconsin line to its southern tip at Cairo, nestled between Kentucky and Missouri. Its political culture is as intriguing as the state is long.

Illinois has produced presidents and leading members of Congress. It also has a long history of political corruption, including, in recent years, the federal indictments of two consecutive governors. The population of the state is exceptionally diverse, with a significant number of new immigrants. Its political allegiance, once firmly Republican, has trended ever more Democratic. Illinois can be divided neatly into three distinct regions: Chicago, the suburban collar surrounding the city, and the ninety-five downstate counties.

Based on the research and experience of respected veterans of Illinois politics, this book shows how the government runs, how politics operates, and what obstacles and opportunities exist for change. It explains how power is exercised and how parties compete for it. For engaged citizens, scholars, and students, Illinois Politics: A Citizen's Guide is a timely and much-needed roadmap for positive change.

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Illinois Politics
A Citizen's Guide to Power, Politics, and Government
Melissa Mouritsen, Kent D. Redfield, and James D. Nowlan
University of Illinois Press, 2024

Shifting demographics. Downstate versus Chicago. Billionaires and bribery. Even veteran observers need a roadmap to track Illinois’ ever-changing political landscape. Melissa Mouritsen, Kent D. Redfield, and James D. Nowlan provide an up-to-date primer on Prairie State politics, government, and policies. Features include:

  • Discussions of recent events like the 2015-2017 budget disaster, the response to COVID-19, and the fall of longtime House Speaker Michael Madigan;
  • New chapters on corruption, social policies, and the political rules of the game;
  • Perspectives on the nuts-and-bolts of campaign funding, the ways political actors acquire power or influence, and many other topics;
  • Close examinations of complex issues like the state’s increased polarization and its ongoing fiscal recovery.

Fully revised and expanded, <i>Illinois Politics</i> blends detailed information with expert analysis to offer an essential resource for citizens, students, and public servants alike.

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Illinois Trails & Traces
Portraits and Stories along the State’s Historic Routes
Text by Gary Marx and photographs by Daniel Overturf, with a foreword by Dick Durbin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award in “Books, Other”!
FINALIST, 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Nonfiction!

Exploring Illinois history through the paths we travel


Illinois Trails & Traces partners the deft writing of Gary Marx with vivid photography by Daniel Overturf to illuminate ever evolving patterns of travel and settlement. Taking the reader on a journey down early buffalo traces and Native American trails, this book shows how these paths evolved into wagon roads and paved highways. Marx and Overturf explore historic routes ranging from Route 66 to the Underground Railroad, all the way back to post-Ice Age animal migration trails followed by Paleo-Indian people. The authors also examine how rivers, canals, and railroads spurred the rapid rise of Illinois as a modern state.

Marx and Overturf bring history into the present by including over forty photographic portraits and written profiles of individuals who live along these routes today. Many of the people you will meet on these pages work to preserve and honor the history of these passages. Others profiled here embody the spirit of the old roads and provide a vivid link between past and present. Through this journey, we discover that we’ve all been traveling the same road all along.
 
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Illinois Wines and Wineries
The Essential Guide
Clara Orban
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

For more than a century, Illinois has been home to a blossoming wine culture, yet winemaking in the state has not received the attention it deserves. Now, Clara Orban has created the ultimate companion to Illinois wines and wineries. This illustrated volume is a comprehensive yet user-friendly guide for both experienced wine lovers and amateur oenophiles.

Orban, a certified sommelier, begins with the history of Illinois wine production and wineries. She then enlightens readers on such wine basics as the most common grapes grown in Illinois, optimal food and wine pairings, the tenets of wine tasting, and provides an overview of the world of labels, bottles, and corks. The fascinating science of wine also is discussed, including the particulars of Illinois soil and climate and their effect on the industry. Orban then provides a guide to all the wineries listed by the Illinois Grape Growers and Vintners’ Association. For each winery, she offers a succinct history, information regarding the variety of grapes used, hours of operation, location, and contact information.

In addition to providing readers with a background of the state’s industry and snapshots of individual wineries, Illinois Wines and Wineries provides a glossary of key wine terms, including those specific to the state of Illinois, as well as color photos and a map to each location visited in the book. This sophisticated yet practical guidebook is an essential resource for connoisseurs and casual enthusiasts alike who are interested in exploring Illinois’s rich winemaking legacy.

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Illinois’s War
The Civil War in Documents
Mark Hubbard
Ohio University Press, 2013

On the eve of the Civil War and after, Illinois was one of the most significant states in the Union. Its history is, in many respects, the history of the Union writ large: its political leaders figured centrally in the war’s origins, progress, and legacies; and its diverse residents made sacrifices and contributions—both on the battlefield and on the home front—that proved essential to Union victory.

The documents in Illinois’s War reveal how the state and its people came to assume such a prominent role in this nation’s greatest conflict. In these crucial decades Illinois experienced its astonishing rise from rural frontier to economic and political powerhouse. But also in these years Illinois was, like the nation itself, a “house divided” over the expansion of slavery, the place of blacks in society, and the policies of the federal government both during and after the Civil War. Illinois’s War illuminates these conflicts in sharp relief, as well as the ways in which Illinoisans united in both saving the Union and transforming their state. Through the firsthand accounts of men and women who experienced these tumultuous decades, Illinois’s War presents the dramatic story of the Prairie State’s pivotal role in the sectional crisis, as well as the many ways in which the Civil War era altered the destiny of Illinois and its citizens.

Illinois’s War is the first book-length history of the state during the Civil War years since Victor Hicken’s Illinois in the Civil War, first published in 1966. Mark Hubbard has compiled a rich collection of letters, editorials, speeches, organizational records, diaries, and memoirs from farmers and workers, men and women, free blacks and runaway slaves, native-born and foreign-born, common soldiers and decorated generals, state and nationally recognized political leaders. The book presents fresh details of Illinois’s history during the Civil War era, and reflects the latest interpretations and evidence on the state’s social and political development.

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Imprints
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago
John N. Low
Michigan State University Press, 2016
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians has been a part of Chicago since its founding. In very public expressions of indigeneity, they have refused to hide in plain sight or assimilate. Instead, throughout the city’s history, the Pokagon Potawatomi Indians have openly and aggressively expressed their refusal to be marginalized or forgotten—and in doing so, they have contributed to the fabric and history of the city.
Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago examines the ways some Pokagon Potawatomi tribal members have maintained a distinct Native identity, their rejection of assimilation into the mainstream, and their desire for inclusion in the larger contemporary society without forfeiting their “Indianness.” Mindful that contact is never a one-way street, Low also examines the ways in which experiences in Chicago have influenced the Pokagon Potawatomi. Imprints continues the recent scholarship on the urban Indian experience before as well as after World War II.
 
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In Lincoln's Shadow
The 1908 Race Riot in Springfield, Illinois
Roberta Senechal de la Roche
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in the United States!
Winner of the Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award!


This detailed case study of the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, which began only a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s family home, explores the social origins of rioting by whites against the city’s African American community after a white woman alleged that a black man had raped her. Over two days rioters wrecked black-owned businesses, burned neighborhoods to the ground, killed two black men, and injured many others.

Author Roberta Senechal de la Roche draws from a wide range of sources to describe the riot, identify the rioters and their victims, and challenge previous interpretations that attribute rioting to interracial competition for jobs, housing, or political influence. Written in a direct and clear style, In Lincoln’s Shadow documents a violent explosion of racial hatred that shocked the nation and reveals the complexity of white racial attitudes in the early twentieth century.

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In Mrs. Tully's Room
A Childcare Portrait
Vivian Gussin Paley
Harvard University Press, 2001
In Mrs. Tully's Room makes a quiet but powerful case for the pedagogical skill and psychological insight that childcare providers—so often underpaid and undervalued—can bring to their work. It also emphasizes how warm, quasi-familial, even mentoring relationships can develop between childcare providers and their preschool families.
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In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde
An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum
Matti Bunzl
University of Chicago Press, 2014
In 2008, anthropologist Matti Bunzl was given rare access to observe the curatorial department of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. For five months, he sat with the institution’s staff, witnessing firsthand what truly goes on behind the scenes at a contemporary art museum. From fund-raising and owner loans to museum-artist relations to the immense effort involved in safely shipping sixty works from twenty-seven lenders in fourteen cities and five countries, Matti Bunzl’s In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde illustrates the inner workings of one of Chicago’s premier cultural institutions.

Bunzl’s ethnography is designed to show how a commitment to the avant-garde can come into conflict with an imperative for growth, leading to the abandonment of the new and difficult in favor of the entertaining and profitable. Jeff Koons, whose massive retrospective debuted during Bunzl's research, occupies a central place in his book and exposes the anxieties caused by such seemingly pornographic work as the infamous Made in Heaven series. Featuring cameos by other leading artists, including Liam Gillick, Jenny Holzer, Karen Kilimnik, and Tino Sehgal, the drama Bunzl narrates is palpable and entertaining and sheds an altogether new light on the contemporary art boom.
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In Search of Belonging
Latinas, Media, and Citizenship
Jillian M Baez
University of Illinois Press, 2018
In Search of Belonging explores the ways Latina/o audiences in general, and women in particular, make sense of and engage both mainstream and Spanish-language media. Jillian M. Báez’s eye-opening ethnographic analysis draws on the experiences of a diverse group of Latinas in Chicago. In-depth interviews reveal Latinas viewing media images through a lens of citizenship. These women search for nothing less than recognition—and belonging—through representations of Latinas in films, advertising, telenovelas, and TV shows like Ugly Betty and Modern Family. Báez's personal interactions and research merge to create a fascinating portrait, one that privileges the perspectives of the women themselves as they consume media in complex, unpredictable ways.

Innovative and informed by a wealth of new evidence, In Search of Belonging answers important questions about the ways Latinas perform citizenship in today’s America.

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In Their Letters, in Their Words
Illinois Civil War Soldiers Write Home
Edited by Mark Flotow
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
WINNER, Russell P. Strange Memorial Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2020!

A vital lifeline to home during the Civil War, the letters of soldiers to their families and friends remain a treasure for those seeking to connect with and understand the most turbulent period of American history. Rather than focus on the experiences of a few witnesses, this impressively researched book documents 165 Illinois Civil War soldiers’ and sailors’ lives through the lens of their personal letters. Editor Mark Flotow chose a variety of letter writers who hailed from counties throughout the state, served in different branches of the military at different ranks, and represented the gamut of social experiences and war outcomes.

Flotow provides extensive quotations from the letters. By allowing the soldiers to speak for themselves, he captures what mattered most to them. Illinois soldiers wrote about their reasons for enlisting; the nature of training and duties; necessities like eating, sleeping, marching, and making the best of often harsh and chaotic circumstances; Southern culture; slavery; their opinions of commanding officers and the president; disease, medicine, and hospitals; their prisoner-of-war experiences; and the ways they left the army. Through letters from afar, many soldiers sought to manage their homes and farms, while some single men attempted to woo their sweethearts.

Flotow includes brief biographies for each soldier quoted in the book, weaves historical context and analysis with the letters, and organizes them by topic. Thus, intimate details cited in individual letters reveal their significance for those who lived and shaped this tumultuous era. The result is not only insightful history but also compelling reading.
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Indian Metropolis
Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-75
James B. LaGrand
University of Illinois Press, 2002

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The Insane Chicago Way
The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia
John M. Hagedorn
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The Insane Chicago Way is the untold story of a daring plan by Chicago gangs in the 1990s to create a Spanish Mafia—and why it failed. John M. Hagedorn traces how Chicago Latino gang leaders, following in Al Capone’s footsteps, built a sophisticated organization dedicated to organizing crime and reducing violence. His lively stories of extensive cross-neighborhood gang organization, tales of police/gang corruption, and discovery of covert gang connections to Chicago’s Mafia challenge conventional wisdom and offer lessons for the control of violence today.

The book centers on the secret history of Spanish Growth & Development (SGD)—an organization of Latino gangs founded in 1989 and modeled on the Mafia’s nationwide Commission. It also tells a story within a story of the criminal exploits of the C-Note$, the “minor league” team of the Chicago’s Mafia (called the “Outfit”), which influenced the direction of SGD. Hagedorn’s tale is based on three years of interviews with an Outfit soldier as well as access to SGD’s constitution and other secret documents, which he supplements with interviews of key SGD leaders, court records, and newspaper accounts. The result is a stunning, heretofore unknown history of the grand ambitions of Chicago gang leaders that ultimately led to SGD’s shocking collapse in a pool of blood on the steps of a gang-organized peace conference.

The Insane Chicago Way is a compelling history of the lives and deaths of Chicago gang leaders. At the same time it is a sociological tour de force that warns of the dangers of organized crime while arguing that today’s relative disorganization of gangs presents opportunities for intervention and reductions in violence.
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Integrating the Inner City
The Promise and Perils of Mixed-Income Public Housing Transformation
Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph
University of Chicago Press, 2015
For many years Chicago’s looming large-scale housing projects defined the city, and their demolition and redevelopment—via the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation—has been perhaps the most startling change in the city’s urban landscape in the last twenty years. The Plan, which reflects a broader policy effort to remake public housing in cities across the country, seeks to deconcentrate poverty by transforming high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments and thereby integrating once-isolated public housing residents into the social and economic fabric of the city. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification?

In the most thorough examination of mixed-income public housing redevelopment to date, Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph draw on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and volumes of data to demonstrate that while considerable progress has been made in transforming the complexes physically, the integrationist goals of the policy have not been met. They provide a highly textured investigation into what it takes to design, finance, build, and populate a mixed-income development, and they illuminate the many challenges and limitations of the policy as a solution to urban poverty. Timely and relevant, Chaskin and Joseph’s findings raise concerns about the increased privatization of housing for the poor while providing a wide range of recommendations for a better way forward.
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The Irish in Illinois
Mathieu W. Billings and Sean Farrell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2021
The first statewide history of the Irish in the Prairie State
 
Today over a million people in Illinois claim Irish ancestry and celebrate their love for Ireland. In this concise narrative history, authors Mathieu W. Billings and Sean Farrell bring together both familiar and unheralded stories of the Irish in Illinois, highlighting the critical roles these immigrants and their descendants played in the settlement and the making of the Prairie State. Short biographies and twenty-eight photographs vividly illustrate the significance and diversity of Irish contributions to Illinois.

Billings and Farrell remind us of the countless ways Irish men and women have shaped the history and culture of the state. They fought in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and two world wars; built the state’s infrastructure and worked in its factories; taught Illinois children and served the poor. Irish political leaders helped to draw up the state’s first constitution, served in city, county, and state offices, and created a machine that dominated twentieth-century politics in Chicago and the state.

This lively history adds to our understanding of the history of the Irish in the state over the past two hundred fifty years. Illinoisans and Midwesterners celebrating their connections to Ireland will treasure this rich and important account of the state’s history.
 
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An Irish-American Odyssey
The Remarkable Rise of the O'Shaughnessy Brothers
Colum Kenny
University of Missouri Press, 2014
The O’Shaughnessy brothers’ story takes place between 1860 and 1950 in Illinois, Missouri, New York, and Ireland. They were the children of an impoverished immigrant who fled the famine in Ireland and his Irish-American wife.An Irish-American Odysseyis the tale of this first-generation immigrant family’s struggle to assimilate into American society, highlighting their perseverance and determination to seize opportunities and surmount obstacles, all the while establishing a legacy for their own descendants in American art, advertising, journalism, and public service.
TIME magazine called James O’Shaughnessy “the best in the business” of advertising, and he became the first chief executive of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Earlier, he was a “star” reporter at the Chicago Tribune, and James and Francis were centrally involved in founding and maintaining the Irish Fellowship Club. Francis was also the first graduate of the University of Notre Dame to be invited to deliver its annual commencement address, while Martin was the first captain of Notre Dame’s official basketball team. An attorney, John represented the alleged victim in a notorious “white slavery” case. Thomas (“Gus”) became the leading Gaelic Revival artist in America as well as a promoter of Italian-American heritage, campaigning successfully to have Columbus Day enacted a public holiday.
The remarkable rise of the O’Shaughnessy brothers proves the American dream is attainable.
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Irma
A Chicago Woman's Story, 1871-1966
Ellen Fitzsimmons Steinberg
University of Iowa Press, 2004
Ellen Steinberg’s Irma, painstakingly crafted out of Irma Rosenthal Frankenstein’s voluminous writings, gives us an inspiring and richly rewarding account of the life and times of an active, socially engaged woman who devoted herself to her family and her community over the course of a long and full life. Irma (1871-1966) was born in Chicago—just before the Chicago Fire—of German Jewish parents who had come to the U.S. shortly after the Civil War. Irma attended public schools and the University of Chicago, participated energetically in Jewish women’s and social-welfare activities, raised her family, and published one poem and a small book.

Irma’s journals and diaries were private accounts in which she chronicled the rhythm of her days and the shape of her life. She recorded her thoughts and short quotations from her reading, jotted down her own poems and short stories, constructed dinner-party menus, and wrote biographical sketches of her family. Interspersed among the records of what she did when and with whom are a number of lengthy reflections on Chicago history, her early life, religious beliefs, education, her aspirations, disappointments, sorrows, and successes. She documented her family’s activities during the Chicago Fire, the city’s rebuilding, early educational curricula in the city’s schools, what it was like to participate in the suffrage movement and vote for the first time, the effect of the Great Depression on the middle class, and World War II as seen from her perspective.

In each chapter, Ellen Steinberg has set Irma’s contemporary entries and later memoirs against the context of the Chicago history that Irma knew so well. Irma’s story will fascinate those interested in diaries and autobiography, women’s history, and Chicago history. From a plethora of rich source materials—including over half a million words of Irma’s writings alone—Steinberg has created a seamless, fascinating narrative about a Chicago woman who, although “nobody famous” (in her words), lived a vital life in a vibrant city.
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Islam In Urban America
Sunni Muslims In Chicago
Garbi Schmidt
Temple University Press, 2004
In recent years, world events have trained a harsh spotlight on the Muslim religion and its adherents. The misunderstanding and bias against Muslims in the United States not only persists but has deepened. In this detailed study of an immigrant community in Chicago, Garbi Schmidt considers the formation and meaning of an "American Islam." This vivid portrait of the people and the institutions that draw them together contributes to the academic literature on ethnic and religious identity at the same time as it depicts an immigrant community's struggle against bias and forces that threaten its cohesion.Chicago has long been home to Muslim immigrants from numerous countries in the Middle East and South Asia. For some members of these groups religion carries more weight than ethnic identity in the American context and enables them to form and participate in a broad spectrum of institutions that support their religious and social interests. Schmidt offers her observations of the schools and student associations that serve young Muslims as well as the social, religious, and political organizations that serve adults. By looking at the ways in which children, adolescents, and adults come together in these institutions, she is able to show the dynamic process in which a variegated American Muslim identity takes shape. Readers will come away from this book with a better understanding of the ideological and cultural differences among Muslims and a greater appreciation of their struggles in becoming Americans.
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It Happened in Southern Illinois
John W. Allen
Southern Illinois University Press, 1968

In this collection of articles describing the people, places, and folkways of southern Illinois, John W. Allen provides entertaining and informative glimpses into the region’s past. Included here are sketches of the early pioneering days when wolves were literally chased from the door, stories about the many Indian artifacts discovered among the rolling hills and valleys of the area, and articles pertaining to the strategic role the region played during the Civil War. Allen also describes the activities of such infamous outlaws as Samuel Mason and the Harpe brothers as well as the famous Illinois-born heroes “Bat” Masterson, “Wild Bill” Hickok, and Wyatt Earp.

In his warm and friendly style, Allen reminisces about the self-sufficient and satisfying rural life of a previous generation with its oxcarts, pie suppers, threshing machines, kerosene lamps, and blacksmith shops. Any reader interested in southern Illinois and its history will delight in this collection of stories from John W. Allen’s popular newspaper column, “It Happened in Southern Illinois.”

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It's Good to Be Black
Ruby Berkley Goodwin
Southern Illinois University Press, 1953

From the preface by Carmen Kenya Wadley:

“Is it good to be black? To Ruby Berkley Goodwin it was....The black she writes about has nothing to do with skin color, but it does have a great deal to do with self images, values, spiritual strength, and most of all love. Unlike the contradicting definitions of blackness we see reflected in today's crime statistics, movies, television, newspapers, political speeches, advertisements, and sociological reports, Ruby Berkley Goodwin's definition of blackness is simple and to the point: black is good. It's Good to be Black is more than the story (history) of a black family living in Du Quoin, Illinois, during the early 1900s; it is a reaffirmation for all of us who know in our hearts that there is still good in the world and that some of that good is black.”
 

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I've Got to Make My Livin'
Black Women's Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
Cynthia M. Blair
University of Chicago Press, 2010

For many years, the interrelated histories of prostitution and cities have perked the ears of urban scholars, but until now the history of urban sex work has dealt only in passing with questions of race. In I’ve Got to Make My Livin’, Cynthia Blair explores African American women’s sex work in Chicago during the decades of some of the city’s most explosive growth, expanding not just our view of prostitution, but also of black women’s labor, the Great Migration, black and white reform movements, and the emergence of modern sexuality.

Focusing on the notorious sex districts of the city’s south side, Blair paints a complex portrait of black prostitutes as conscious actors and historical agents; prostitution, she argues here, was both an arena of exploitation and abuse, as well as a means of resisting middle-class sexual and economic norms. Blair ultimately illustrates just how powerful these norms were, offering stories about the struggles that emerged among black and white urbanites in response to black women’s increasing visibility in the city’s sex economy. Through these powerful narratives, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’ reveals the intersecting racial struggles and sexual anxieties that underpinned the celebration of Chicago as the quintessentially modern twentieth-century city.

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