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The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide
A History of Squares & Slices in the Windy City
Steve Dolinsky
Northwestern University Press, 2021
The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide is your comprehensive guide to the history of the styles, locales, and people that make the Windy City a prime destination for slices and pies. Most locals have strong opinions about whether thin, tavern-style, or deep-dish takes the crown, which toppings are essential, and who makes the best pie in town—and in Chicago, there's a destination for every preference. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago saw an unprecedented number of new pizzerias opening their doors, very few of which focused on the proverbial deep-dish. Several high-end chefs made the pivot to pizza, and in many cases, brought new ideas and styles, like East Coast Sicilians and thin, crispy (and cheeseless) Roman pies. With so many slices to try in the city’s seventy-seven neighborhoods, it would seem impossible to find the best of the best.
 
Enter renowned food journalist Steve Dolinsky. He embarked on a memorable quest for his first book, Pizza City, USA: 101 Reasons Why Chicago Is America’s Greatest Pizza Town, tasting more than 185 pizzas all over the region. For his follow-up, Dolinsky focuses on the city’s pizzerias, while still honoring a few suburban stalwarts.
 
This user-friendly guide is organized by pizza style—including thin, tavern, artisan, Neapolitan, deep-dish, stuffed, by-the-slice, Roman, and Detroit—so you can find the right recommendation for every family member, visitor, and occasion. Dolinsky highlights his favorites, offers a pizza lover’s glossary so you can order like a pro, and shows you every pie he ate, so you can compare notes and cook up your next pizza night. With recipes, local beer pairings, gluten-free options, and more, The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide is an essential resource both for locals and for visitors in search of a serious pizza getaway.
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An Uncertain Tradition
U.S. Senators From Illinois 1818-2003
David Kenney and Robert E. Hartley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003
This sweeping survey constitutes the first comprehensive treatment of the forty-seven individuals—forty-six white males and one African American female—who have been chosen to represent Illinois in the United States Senate from 1818 to 2003. David Kenney and Robert E. Hartley underscore nearly two centuries of Illinois history with these biographical and political portraits, compiling an incomparably rich resource for students, scholars, teachers, journalists, historians, politicians, and any Illinoisan interested in the state’s heritage.  

 

An Uncertain Tradition: U. S. Senators from Illinois, 1818–2003 is a fresh and careful study of the shifting set of political issues occurring over time and illuminated by the lives of participants in the politics of choice and service in the Senate. Kenney and Hartley plot the course of the state’s varied senatorial leadership, from the state’s founding and the appearance of political parties, through the Civil War and its aftermath, and into the diverse political climate of the twenty-first century. From the notorious to the heroic, the popular to the pioneering, the senatorial roster includes such luminaries as “The Little Giant” Stephen A. Douglas; Lyman Trumbull, who served three terms in the Civil War era; “Uncle Dick” and “Black Jack,” also known as Richard Oglesby and John A. Logan; the “Wizard of Ooze” Everett Dirksen; and modern leaders such as Adlai Stevenson III, Paul Simon, and Carol Moseley-Braun. 

 

Kenney and Hartley offer incisive commentary on the quality of senate service in each case, as well as timeline graphs relating to the succession of individuals in each of the two sequences of service, the geographical distribution of senators within the state, and the variations in party voting for senate candidates. Rigorously documented and supremely readable, this convenient reference volume is enhanced by portraits of many of the senators.

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Unequal City
Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice
Carla Shedd is assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Columbia University.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2015
Chicago has long struggled with racial residential segregation, high rates of poverty, and deepening class stratification, and it can be a challenging place for adolescents to grow up. Unequal City examines the ways in which Chicago’s most vulnerable residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law. In this pioneering analysis of the intersection of race, place, and opportunity, sociologist and criminal justice expert Carla Shedd illuminates how schools either reinforce or ameliorate the social inequalities that shape the worlds of these adolescents.

Shedd draws from an array of data and in-depth interviews with Chicago youth to offer new insight into this understudied group. Focusing on four public high schools with differing student bodies, Shedd reveals how the predominantly low-income African American students at one school encounter obstacles their more affluent, white counterparts on the other side of the city do not face. Teens often travel long distances to attend school which, due to Chicago’s segregated and highly unequal neighborhoods, can involve crossing class, race, and gang lines. As Shedd explains, the disadvantaged teens who traverse these boundaries daily develop a keen “perception of injustice,” or the recognition that their economic and educational opportunities are restricted by their place in the social hierarchy.

Adolescents’ worldviews are also influenced by encounters with law enforcement while traveling to school and during school hours. Shedd tracks the rise of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and pat-downs at certain Chicago schools. Along with police procedures like stop-and-frisk, these prison-like practices lead to distrust of authority and feelings of powerlessness among the adolescents who experience mistreatment either firsthand or vicariously. Shedd finds that the racial composition of the student body profoundly shapes students’ perceptions of injustice. The more diverse a school is, the more likely its students of color will recognize whether they are subject to discriminatory treatment. By contrast, African American and Hispanic youth whose schools and neighborhoods are both highly segregated and highly policed are less likely to understand their individual and group disadvantage due to their lack of exposure to youth of differing backgrounds.
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The University of Chicago
A History
John W. Boyer
University of Chicago Press, 2015
One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than 150 countries, its impact is far-reaching and long-lasting.

With The University of Chicago: A History, John W. Boyer, Dean of the College since 1992, presents a deeply researched and comprehensive history of the university. Boyer has mined the archives, exploring the school’s complex and sometimes controversial past to set myth and hearsay apart from fact. The result is a fascinating narrative of a legendary academic community, one that brings to light the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the conditions that have enabled the university to survive and sustain itself through decades of change.

Boyer’s extensive research shows that the University of Chicago’s identity is profoundly interwoven with its history, and that history is unique in the annals of American higher education. After a little-known false start in the mid-nineteenth century, it achieved remarkable early successes, yet in the 1950s it faced a collapse of undergraduate enrollment, which proved fiscally debilitating for decades. Throughout, the university retained its fierce commitment to a distinctive, intense academic culture marked by intellectual merit and free debate, allowing it to rise to international acclaim. Today it maintains a strong obligation to serve the larger community through its connections to alumni, to the city of Chicago, and increasingly to its global community.

Published to coincide with the 125th anniversary of the university, this must-have reference will appeal to alumni and anyone interested in the history of higher education of the United States.

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The University of Illinois, 1894-1904
THE SHAPING OF THE UNIVERSITY
Winton U. Solberg
University of Illinois Press, 2000
The distinguished historian Winton U. Solberg presents a detailed case study of one institution's transformation into a modern American university.
 
The years 1894 to 1904 mark the stormy tenure of Andrew S. Draper as president of the University of Illinois. Draper, a successful superintendent of schools with no college or university experience and no credentials as a post-secondary administrator, presided over many crucial improvements in the university's physical plant, curricula, and other areas. However, he failed to infuse the university with a spirit of cohesion, and his term as president was fraught with conflict.
From his inauguration on, the autocratic Draper collided with deans and faculty who opposed both the substance of his changes and the manner in which he presented and implemented them.
 
This volume closely examines the Draper years from the perspectives of faculty, students, and administrators. Solberg outlines the administrative, faculty, staff, and physical infrastructure. He also reveals a vibrant and varied student life, including a whirl of social activities, literary societies, intercollegiate debate and athletics, hazing, religion, and increasingly prominent fraternities.
 
A sharply delineated and detailed picture of a university in transition, The University of Illinois, 1894-1904 traces the school's shift from an institution known primarily as a training ground for engineers to a full-fledged university poised to compete on the national level.
 
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The University of Illinois
Engine of Innovation
Edited by Frederick E. Hoxie
University of Illinois Press, 2017
The founding of the university in 1867 created a unique community in what had been a prairie. Within a few years, this creative mix of teachers and scholars produced innovations in agriculture, engineering and the arts that challenged old ideas and stimulated dynamic new industries. Projects ranging from the Mosaic web browser to the discovery of Archaea and pioneering triumphs in women's education and wheelchair accessibility have helped shape the university's mission into a double helix of innovation and real-world change. These essays explore the university's celebrated accomplishments and historic legacy, candidly assessing both its successes and its setbacks. Experts and students tell the eye-opening stories of campus legends and overlooked game-changers, of astonishing technical and social invention, of incubators of progress as diverse as the Beckman Institute and Ebertfest. Contributors: James R. Barrett, George O. Batzli, Claire Benjamin, Jeffrey D. Brawn, Jimena Canales, Stephanie A. Dick, Poshek Fu, Marcelo H. Garcia, Lillian Hoddeson, Harry Liebersohn, Claudia Lutz, Kathleen Mapes, Vicki McKinney, Elisa Miller, Robert Michael Morrissey, Bryan E. Norwood, Elizabeth H. Pleck, Leslie J. Reagan, Susan M. Rigdon, David Rosenboom, Katherine Skwarczek, Winton U. Solberg, Carol Spindel, William F. Tracy, and Joy Ann Williamson-Lott.
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An Unseen Unheard Minority
Asian American Students at the University of Illinois
Sharon S. Lee
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Higher education hails Asian American students as model minorities who face no educational barriers given their purported cultural values of hard work and political passivity. Described as “over-represented,” Asian Americans have been overlooked in discussions about diversity; however, racial hostility continues to affect Asian American students, and they have actively challenged their invisibility in minority student discussions. This study details the history of Asian American student activism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, as students rejected the university’s definition of minority student needs that relied on a model minority myth, measures of under-representation, and a Black-White racial model, concepts that made them an “unseen unheard minority.” This activism led to the creation on campus of one of the largest Asian American Studies programs and Asian American cultural centers in the Midwest. Their histories reveal the limitations of understanding minority student needs solely along measures of under-representation and the realities of race for Asian American college students.
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An Unsentimental Education
Writers and Chicago
Molly McQuade
University of Chicago Press, 1995
"Writers are both born and made, and their teachers share in the making of them, but in what ways?" Molly McQuade asks in An Unsentimental Education, a collection of candid interviews with twenty-one of our leading novelists and poets. Presented as first-person essays, the interviews are with contemporary writers who have studied, taught at, or cultivated other ties with the University of Chicago. The book provides an occasion for the writers to reflect on their Chicago experiences and on ideas about education in general. What education does a writer need? How can formal learning impel the writing life? What school stories or tales told out of school do Philip Roth, Hayden Carruth, Marguerite Young, George Steiner, Charles Simic, Susan Sontag, and Saul Bellow have in store and want to share.

Interviews with:Saul Bellow, Paul Carroll, Hayden Carruth, Robert Coover, Leon Forrest, June Jordan, Janet Kauffman, Morris Philipson, M. L. Rosenthal, Philip Roth, Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, Charles Simic, Susan Sontag, George Starbuck, George Steiner, Richard Stern, Nathaniel Tarn, Douglas Unger, Kurt Vonnegut, and Marguerite Young.
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Up in Here
Jailing Kids on Chicago's Other Side
Mark Dostert
University of Iowa Press, 2014
Raised in a comfortable Dallas suburb, Mark Dostert crossed cultural and socioeconomic boundaries as a college student by volunteering as a counselor at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, Chicago’s infamous 500-cell juvenile jail, known locally as the Audy Home. Inmates there had been indicted on first-degree murder, rape, and carjacking charges, yet some enthusiastically met with him for weekly Bible-based lessons and discussions. Dostert formed friendly relationships with his students and envisioned becoming an even closer mentor to the legally troubled boys when he became an employee there after graduating from college.

The juveniles’ attitudes toward Dostert change, however, once he begins working as a “Children’s Attendant” at the Audy Home, clocking in for eight hours every day to enforce rules and maintain order on the cellblocks. His colorblind, altruistic volunteer world fractures into a full-time, emotionally charged reality of white and black and brown. When the boys change, he must change too. Despite wanting to help them feel human in such a dehumanizing environment, Dostert realizes he needs to make sure his kindness is not perceived as weakness. Dostert learns to march the juveniles through the facility to school, recreation activities, and chapel. He must strip-search them, interrupt their brawls, root through their cells for drugs and handcrafted weapons, and monitor group showers to thwart sexual extortion and the inscription of gang symbols in soap on walls and mirrors. Week after week and month after month, the job exposes hidden views not only of the juveniles and the “system” incarcerating them, but of Children’s Attendant Dostert himself.

From one man’s struggle to reconcile his humanitarian intentions with his actual job responsibilities in what, to him, is a strange new world, emerges a sincere effort to confront the realities of America’s persisting racial tensions and institutionalized poverty. Dostert’s story is an honest and unflinching journey from thinking he has many of the answers for how to change this world to discovering how little he really knows about the world he is trying to change.
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Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief
The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman
Carl Smith
University of Chicago Press, 1994
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, and the making and unmaking of the model town of Pullman—these remarkable events in what many considered the quintessential American city forced people across the country to confront the disorder that seemed inevitably to accompany urban growth and social change. In this book, Carl Smith explores the imaginative dimensions of these events as he traces the evolution of beliefs that increasingly linked city, disorder, and social reality in the minds of Americans. Studying a remarkable range of writings and illustrations, as well as protests, public gatherings, trials, hearings, and urban reform and construction efforts, Smith argues that these three events—and the public awareness of the them—not only informed one another, but collectively shaped how Americans saw, and continue to see, the city.
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Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief
The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman, Second Edition
Carl Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2007
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, and the making and unmaking of the model town of Pullman—these remarkable events in what many considered the quintessential American city forced people across the country to confront the disorder that seemed inevitably to accompany urban growth and social change.

In Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, Carl Smith explores the imaginative dimensions of these events as he traces the evolution of interconnected beliefs and actions that increasingly linked city, disorder, and social reality in the minds of Americans. Examining a remarkable range of writings and illustrations, as well as protests, public gatherings, trials, hearings, and urban reform and construction efforts, Smith argues that these three events—and the public awareness of them—not only informed one another, but collectively shaped how Americans understood, and continue to understand, Chicago and modern urban life.

This classic of urban cultural history is updated with a foreword by the author that expands our understanding of urban disorder to encompass such recent examples as Hurricane Katrina, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and 9/11.

 “Cultural history at its finest.  By utilizing questions and methodologies of urban studies, social history, and literary history, Smith creates a sophisticated account of changing visions of urban America.”—Robin F. Bachin, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
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Urban Lawyers
The New Social Structure of the Bar
John P. Heinz, Robert L. Nelson, Rebecca L. Sandefur, and Edward O. Laumann
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Over the past several decades, the number of lawyers in large cities has doubled, women have entered the bar at an unprecedented rate, and the scale of firms has greatly expanded. This immense growth has transformed the nature and social structure of the legal profession. In the most comprehensive analysis of the urban bar to date, Urban Lawyers presents a compelling portrait of how these changes continue to shape the field of law today.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Chicago lawyers, the authors demonstrate how developments in the profession have affected virtually every aspect of the work and careers of urban lawyers-their relationships with clients, job tenure and satisfaction, income, social and political values, networks of professional connections, and patterns of participation in the broader community. Yet despite the dramatic changes, much remains the same. Stratification of income and power based on gender, race, and religious background, for instance, still maintains inequality within the bar.

The authors of Urban Lawyers conclude that organizational priorities will likely determine the future direction of the legal profession. And with this landmark study as their guide, readers will be able to make their own informed predictions.
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