Drawing visitors to the heart of Chicago's north side for 135 years, Lincoln Park Zoo is one of the oldest and most popular zoos in America. This thorough and fascinating history of the zoo combines archival materials, photographs, and oral histories to chronicle the zoo's development and chart the unique role it has played not just in the growth of Chicago but in the establishment of zoos in cities across America.
 
Lincoln Park Zoo was established in 1868 when New York's Central Park Commissioners sent the Lincoln Park Commissioners the gift of two pairs of swans. The swans were such a popular attraction that the park commissioners began acquiring other animals and building quarters for them, adding a bear cage, a bison enclosure, a sea lion pool, an eagle exhibit, and an animal house, all before 1900.
 
Although the zoo was initially conceived as a primarily recreational attraction, its mission has evolved over time, with conservation, science, and education now forming central elements. Starting in 1884, when the zoo saw what was reportedly the first-ever birth of a North American bison in captivity, Lincoln Park Zoo has been part of the effort to study and protect endangered species from all over the world.
 
This comprehensive history of Lincoln Park Zoo also tells the wider story of the growth of the American zoo movement and the changes that have occurred in the past century, as zoos evolved from a leisure pursuit into a multimillion-dollar industry and an invaluable participant in global conservation efforts.
 
 

"Without fully and consciously realizing that they were doing so, the followers of Jesus established a new religious tradition. This book tells the story of yet another assembly of saints whose history, I believe, is in many respects analogous to the history of those early Christians who thought at first that they had found the only proper way to be Jews. Mormonism started to grow away from traditional Christianity almost immediately upon coming into existence. It began as a movement that understood itself as Christian, but. . . these nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints (as they came to be called) embarked on a path that led to developments that now distinguish their tradition from the Christian tradition as surely as early Christianity was distinguished from its Hebraic context."--From the preface
 

The seminal work of Ruth Rubin, a pioneering collector, singer, folklorist, writer, and crusader for the vanishing legacy of the Yiddish world, Voices of a People remains the only general introduction to Yiddish folksong.
A priceless collection of song texts in Yiddish and English, as well as a selection of tunes Rubin transcribed, this volume brings the Jews' ancient, itinerant culture alive through children's songs, dancing songs, and songs about love and courtship, poverty and work, crime and corruption, immigration, and the dream of a homeland. Rubin's notes and annotations weave each text into the larger story of the Jewish experience.
Noted scholar Mark Slobin provides a new foreword that includes a biographical sketch of Rubin and an assessment of her contributions over a lifetime of collecting, absorbing, and disseminating Yiddish folksong.