Results by title
752 books match the query 'Illinois' and 92 start with c
Chicago's Famous Buildings
Franz Schulze and Kevin Harrington
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Chicago's Famous Buildings, fifth edition, completely updated and revised by Franz Schulze and Kevin Harrington, covers more than a decade of extraordinary new architecture and takes a fresh look back at the city's classical legacy of Adler, Sullivan, Burnham, Root, Wright, and Mies van der Rohe. The authors have added many new descriptions and images of the most important projects in Chicago since the fourth edition, including the massive reconstruction of Grant Park around Frank Gehry's Music Pavilion, and they cover as well the current status of older buildings—some destroyed, others, such as Burnham's Reliance Building, marvelously restored and brought back to life. Chicago's Famous Buildings, fifth edition, also includes expanded sections on the city's future and the development of its diverse neighborhoods, presented with new maps to serve as an even more effective walking guide. A glossary of architectural terms, an extensive index, and more than sixty new photographs of both old and new buildings bring this guide completely up-to-date.
Authoritative, informative, and easier to use than ever before, this fifth edition of Chicago's Famous Buildings will serve tourists and residents alike as the leading architectural guide to the treasures of this marvelous city.
Chicago's Grand Midway
A Walk around the World at the Columbian ExpositionNorman Bolotin
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Chicago's Greatest Year, 1893
The White City and the Birth of a Modern MetropolisJoseph Gustaitis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
In 1893, the 27.5 million visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair feasted their eyes on the impressive architecture of the White City, lit at night by thousands of electric lights. In addition to marveling at the revolutionary exhibits, most visitors discovered something else: beyond the fair’s 633 acres lay a modern metropolis that rivaled the world’s greatest cities. The Columbian Exposition marked Chicago’s arrival on the world stage, but even without the splendor of the fair, 1893 would still have been Chicago’s greatest year.
An almost endless list of achievements took place in Chicago in 1893. Chicago’s most important skyscraper was completed in 1893, and Frank Lloyd Wright opened his office in the same year. African American physician and Chicagoan Daniel Hale Williams performed one of the first known open-heart surgeries in 1893. Sears and Roebuck was incorporated, and William Wrigley invented Juicy Fruit gum that year. The Field Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Science and Industry all started in 1893. The Cubs’ new ballpark opened in this year, and an Austro-Hungarian immigrant began selling hot dogs outside the World’s Fair grounds. His wares became the famous “Chicago hot dog.”
“Cities are not buildings; cities are people,” writes author Joseph Gustaitis. Throughout the book, he brings forgotten pioneers back to the forefront of Chicago’s history, connecting these important people of 1893 with their effects on the city and its institutions today. The facts in this history of a year range from funny to astounding, showcasing innovators, civic leaders, VIPs, and power brokers who made 1893 Chicago about so much more than the fair.
Chicago's Historic Hyde Park
Susan O'Connor Davis
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Chicago's Irish Legion
The 90th Illinois Volunteers in the Civil WarJames B. Swan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009
Extensively documented and richly detailed, Chicago’s Irish Legion tells the compelling story of Chicago’s 90th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, the only Irish regiment in Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s XV Army Corps. Swan’s sweeping history of this singular regiment and its pivotal role in the Western Theater of the Civil War draws heavily from primary documents and first-person observations, giving readers an intimate glimpse into the trials and triumphs of ethnic soldiers during one of the most destructive wars in American history.
At the onset of the bitter conflict between the North and the South, Irish immigrants faced a wall of distrust and discrimination in the United States. Many Americans were deeply suspicious of Irish religion and politics, while others openly doubted the dedication of the Irish to the Union cause. Responding to these criticisms with a firm show of patriotism, the Catholic clergy and Irish politicians in northern Illinois—along with the Chicago press and community—joined forces to recruit the Irish Legion. Composed mainly of foreign-born recruits, the Legion rapidly dispelled any rumors of disloyalty with its heroic endeavors for the Union. The volunteers proved to be instrumental in various battles and sieges, as well as the marches to the sea and through the Carolinas, suffering severe casualties and providing indispensable support for the Union. Swan meticulously traces the remarkable journey of these unique soldiers from their regiment’s inception and first military engagement in 1862 to their disbandment and participation in the Grand Review of General Sherman’s army in 1865.
Enhancing the volume are firsthand accounts from the soldiers who endured the misery of frigid winters and brutal environments, struggling against the ravages of disease and hunger as they marched more than twenty-six hundred miles over the course of the war. Also revealed are personal insights into some of the war’s most harrowing events, including the battle at Chattanooga and Sherman’s famous campaign for Atlanta. In addition, Swan exposes the racial issues that affected the soldiers of the 90th Illinois, including their reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation and the formations of the first African American fighting units. Swan rounds out the volume with stories of survivors’ lives after the war, adding an even deeper personal dimension to this absorbing chronicle.
Chicago's North Michigan Avenue
Planning and Development, 1900-1930John W. Stamper
University of Chicago Press, 1991
John W. Stamper traces the complex development of North Michigan Avenue from the 1880s to the 1920s building boom that solidified its character and economic base, describing the initiation of the planning process by private interests to its execution aided by the city's powerful condemnation and taxation proceedings. He focuses on individual buildings constructed on the avenue, including the Renaissance- and Gothic-inspired Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower, and Drake Hotel, and places them within the context of factors governing their construction—property ownership, financing, zoning laws, design theory, and advertising.
Stamper compares this stylistically diverse mixture of low- and high-rise structures with earlier, rejected planning proposals, all of which had prescribed a uniformly designed, European-like avenue of continuous cornice heights, consistent facade widths, and complementary stylistic features. He analyzes the drastically different character the avenue took by 1930, with high-rise towers reaching thirty stories and beyond, in terms of the clash among economic, political, and architectural interests. His argument—that the discrepancies between the rejected plans and reality illustrate the developers' choice of economic return on their investment over aesthetic community—is extended through to the present avenue and the virtual disregard of the urban qualities proposed at its inception. Generously illustrated, with an epilogue condensing the avenue's history between the end of World War II and the present, this is an exhaustive account of an important topic in the history of modern architecture and city planning.
Chicago's Urban Nature
A Guide to the City's Architecture + LandscapeSally A. Kitt Chappell
University of Chicago Press, 2007
At the heart of this new urban concept is the idea of connection, bringing buildings and landscapes, culture and nature, commerce and leisure into an energetic harmony. With Chicago’s Urban Nature in hand, you’ll see those connections woven through the fabric of the city. Chappell provides new insights into such historic Chicago sites as Jens Jensen’s Garfield Park Conservatory, Frederick Law Olmsted’s Jackson Park, and Alfred Caldwell’s Lily Pond, then takes us to the innovative contemporary green spaces they influenced, from City Hall’s rooftop garden to the North Lawndale Green Youth Farm to Chicago’s heralded new Millennium Park. These beautiful green spaces, with their unprecedented melding of art, architecture, and ecology, have become far more than places of escape for Chicagoans—they’re now fully integrated into the urban scene, an essential part of the cultural life of the modern city.
Packed with maps and recommended tours, and bursting with splendid photos, this is an essential guidebook for day-trippers, lifelong Chicago residents, and professionals in landscape architecture, urbanism, and design.
Chicago's War on Syphilis, 1937-40
The Times, the "Trib," and the Clap DoctorSuzanne Poirier
University of Illinois Press, 1995
the importance of her subject." -- Thomas N. Bonner, author of To
the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine
Those struggling to deal with the AIDS epidemic might learn valuable
lessons from the earlier struggle of the U.S. to deal with syphilis. Here,
Suzanne Poirier tells the story of the Chicago Syphilis Control Program
launched in 1937 by the Chicago Board of Health and the U.S. Public Health
Service and severely limited from the start because of the refusal of
government, the press, and the public to confront directly the issues
underlying the problem.
Poirier's narrative is memorable for its vivid scenes, colorful characters
that include Chicago's "clap doctor," Dr. Ben Reitman, and its
account of the heated debate that surrounded the effort. In an epilogue,
the author discusses similarities between current efforts against AIDS
and the handling and politics of the syphilis problem in the late 1930s.
Chicago
Metropolis of the Mid-Continent, 4th EditionIrving Cutler. Foreword by James F. Marran
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006
Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent provides a comprehensive portrayal of the growth and development of Chicago from the mudhole of the prairie to today’s world-class city. This completely revised fourth edition skillfully weaves together the geography, history, economy, and culture of the city and its suburbs with a special emphasis on the role of the many ethnic and racial groups that comprise the “real Chicago” of its neighborhoods. Cutler demonstrates how the geography of “Chicagoland” and the influx of a diverse population spurred transportation, industrial technology, the economy, and sporadic planning to foster rapid urban growth, which brought both great progress and severe problems.
Through insightful analysis, Cutler also traces the demographic and societal changes to Chicago, critically examining such problems as the environment, education, racial tension, crime, welfare, housing, employment, and transportation. Richly illustrated with nearly three hundred drawings, photos, maps, and tables, the volume includes six appendices with sections dedicated to Chicago facts, population growth and income data, weather and climate, significant dates, and historic sites.
Chicagoland Dream Houses
How a Mid-Century Architecture Competition Reimagined the American HomeSiobhan Moroney
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Chicagoland
City and Suburbs in the Railroad AgeAnn Durkin Keating
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Historian and coeditor of the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Chicago, Ann Durkin Keating resurrects for us here the bustling network that defined greater Chicagoland. Taking a new approach to the history of the city, Keating shifts the focus to the landscapes and built environments of the metropolitan region. Organized by four categories of settlements-farm centers, industrial towns, commuter suburbs, and recreational and institutional centers-that framed the city, Chicagoland offers the collective history of 230 neighborhoods and communities, the people who built them, and the structures they left behind that still stand today.
Keating reanimates nineteenth-century Chicagoland with more than a hundred photographs and maps; we find here the taverns, depots, and way stations that were the hubs of the region's vibrant, mobile life. Keating also includes an appendix of driving tours so readers can see this history for themselves. Chicagoland takes us into the buildings and sites that are still part of our landscape and repopulates them with the stories and characters behind their creation. The result is a wide-angle historical view of Chicago, an entirely new way to understand the region.
Chicago’s Art Deco Skyscrapers
Joseph Gustaitis
University of Chicago Press, 2026
With stunning photography and abundant historical details, this book is a treasure trove that will delight any fan of architecture, Chicago, or the Art Deco era.
Chicago is America’s premier city for both historic and modern architecture. Even so, many of its finest buildings remain little known to visitors and Chicagoans alike. In Chicago’s Art Deco Skyscrapers, Joseph Gustaitis showcases nearly two dozen Art Deco towers that were built during the exhilarating years of the Jazz Age, from 1927 to 1933. These skyscrapers exemplify a state of mind from the time—an optimistic, forward-looking aesthetic that has been called the “last of the total styles,” as well as the first American style that spread across the globe. In the time between the Great War and the Great Depression, cities and their architects embraced industrial modernity and the exciting new possibilities of scale. Exploring places like the Board of Trade Building, the Merchandise Mart, and the Carbide and Carbon tower, Gustaitis tells the stories of their creation, architects and developers, construction and financing, zoning and engineering, and so much more.
With stunning aerial photography by Ian McClellan, this book also includes color photos of the buildings’ features, vintage images, a travel map, and in-depth historical information. Chicago’s Art Deco Skyscrapers is both a guidebook to these remarkable structures and a history of the upbeat era that created them.
Chicago’s Modern Mayors
From Harold Washington to Lori LightfootEdited by Dick Simpson and Betty O'Shaughnessy
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Chicago’s transformation into a global city began at City Hall. Dick Simpson and Betty O’Shaughnessy edit in-depth analyses of the five mayors that guided the city through this transition beginning with Harold Washington’s 1983 election: Washington, Eugene Sawyer, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emmanuel, and Lori Lightfoot. Though the respected political science, sociologist, and journalist contributors approach their subjects from distinct perspectives, each essay addresses three essential issues: how and why each mayor won the office; whether the City Council of their time acted as a rubber stamp or independent body; and the ways the unique qualities of each mayor’s administration and accomplishments influenced their legacy.
Filled with expert analysis and valuable insights, Chicago’s Modern Mayors illuminates a time of transition and change and considers the politicians who--for better and worse--shaped the Chicago of today.
Chicanas of 18th Street
Narratives of a Movement from Latino ChicagoLeonard G. Ramirez
University of Illinois Press, 2011
Chief O'Neill's Sketchy Recollections of an Eventful Life in Chicago
Francis O'Neill, Edited by Ellen Skerrett and Mary Lesch with a foreword by Nicholas Carolan
Northwestern University Press, 2008
This remarkable memoir of immigration and assimilation provides a rare view of urban life in Chicago in the late 1800s by a newcomer to the city and the Midwest, and the nation as well. Francis O’Neill left Ireland in 1865. After five years traveling the world as a sailor, he and his family settled in Chicago just shortly before the Great Fire of 1871.
As O’Neill looked back on his life, writing in Chicago at the age of 83, he could give first-hand accounts of the Pullman strike of 1894, the railway strike of 1903, and the packing-house strike of 1904. He could also reflect on the corruption that kept him, in spite of his innovations, extremely high exam scores, and performance, subject to powerful aldermen who prevented his advance as a member of the Chicago Police Department. Despite these obstacles, O’Neill eventually rose to be chief of police—a position from which he could enact much-needed civil service reform. In addition to his professional success, O’Neill is also remembered and beloved for his hobby, preserving traditional Irish music.
O’Neill’s story offers perspective on the inner workings of the police department at the turn of the twentieth century. His memoir also brings to life the challenges involved in succeeding in a new land, providing for his family, and integrating into a new culture. Francis O’Neill serves as a fine documentarian of the Irish immigrant experience in Chicago.
City Creatures
Animal Encounters in the Chicago WildernessEdited by Gavin Van Horn and Dave Aftandilian
University of Chicago Press, 2015
We usually think of cities as the domain of humans—but we are just one of thousands of species that call the urban landscape home. Chicago residents knowingly move among familiar creatures like squirrels, pigeons, and dogs, but might be surprised to learn about all the leafhoppers and water bears, black-crowned night herons and bison, beavers and massasauga rattlesnakes that are living alongside them. City Creatures introduces readers to an astonishing diversity of urban wildlife with a unique and accessible mix of essays, poetry, paintings, and photographs.
The contributors bring a story-based approach to this urban safari, taking readers on birding expeditions to the Magic Hedge at Montrose Harbor on the North Side, canoe trips down the South Fork of the Chicago River (better known as Bubbly Creek), and insect-collecting forays or restoration work days in the suburban forest preserves.
The book is organized into six sections, each highlighting one type of place in which people might encounter animals in the city and suburbs. For example, schoolyard chickens and warrior wasps populate “Backyard Diversity,” live giraffes loom at the zoo and taxidermy-in-progress pheasants fascinate museum-goers in “Animals on Display,” and a chorus of deep-freeze frogs awaits in “Water Worlds.” Although the book is rooted in Chicago’s landscape, nature lovers from cities around the globe will find a wealth of urban animal encounters that will open their senses to a new world that has been there all along. Its powerful combination of insightful narratives, numinous poetry, and full-color art throughout will help readers see the city—and the creatures who share it with us—in an entirely new light.
City Watch
Discovering The Uncommon ChicagoJon Anderson
University of Iowa Press, 2000
In forty-five years as one of Chicago's liveliest journalists for Time, Life, and the Chicago Tribune, Jon Anderson has established a reputation for picking up on what someone once called "the beauty of the specific fact." Part "Talk of the Town," part On the Road with Charles Kuralt, Anderson's twice-a-week "City Watch" columns in the Chicago Tribune seek out interesting and unexpected people and places from the everyday life of what the author calls the "most typical American big city." In the process he discovers the joys and triumphs of ordinary people.
Anderson writes with wit and insight about those who find themselves inspired or obsessed with alternative ways of viewing life or getting through the day. Like the man who started with one light pole, then painted all the poles in his southside neighborhood. Or the founder of Cats-Are-Purrsons-Too, a nun who lives with sixty-seven cats. Or the philosopher who, with no financial success, still publishes a newsletter called "The Meaning of Life." After years of hunting down moments of everyday life that have drama and meaning, Anderson offers a book that has curious power, because all of its stories are true.
Drawn from the best of Anderson's columns, City Watch introduces readers to an eclectic mix of social clubs, subcultures, and minor celebrities. From Foraging Friends, a group of penniless ecologists who forage for wild foods in a county forest preserve, to the annual Dumpster Diver fashion show, from the Oakton Elementary School chess team to a group that calls itself Some Chicago Anarchists, readers will discover the characters and events that define Chicago's local color.
City of American Dreams
A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919Margaret Garb
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Based on research of real estate markets, housing and health reform, and ordinary homeowners—African American and white, affluent and working class—City of American Dreams provides a richly detailed picture of life in one of America's great urban centers. Garb shows that the pursuit of a single-family house set on a tidy yard, commonly seen as the very essence of the American dream, resulted from clashes of interests and decades of struggle.
City of the Big Shoulders
An Anthology of Chicago PoetryRyan G. Van Cleave
University of Iowa Press, 2012
The cultural, ethnic, and aesthetic diversity in this gathering of poems springs from a variety of viewpoints, styles, and voices as multifaceted and energetic as the city itself. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz: “I want to eat / in a city smart enough to know that if you / are going to have that heart attack, you might / as well have the pleasure of knowing // you’ve really earned it”; Renny Golden: “In the heat of May 1937, my grandfather / sits in the spring grass of an industrial park / with hundreds of striking steelworkers”; Joey Nicoletti: “The wind pulls a muscle / as fans yell the vine off the outfield wall, / mustard-stained shirts, hot dog smiles, and all.”
The combined energies of these poems reveal the mystery and beauty that is Second City, the City by the Lake, New Gotham, Paris on the Prairie, the Windy City, the Heart of America, and Sandburg’s iconic City of the Big Shoulders.
Claiming Neighborhood
New Ways of Understanding Urban ChangeJohn Betancur
University of Illinois Press, 2016
As the authors show, a diverse collection of people including urban policy experts, elected officials, investors, resident leaders, institutions, community-based organizations, and many others compete to control how neighborhoods change and are characterized. Betancur and Smith argue that neighborhoods have become sites of consumption and spaces to be consumed. Discourse is used to add and subtract value from them. The romanticized image of "the neighborhood" exaggerates or obscures race and class struggles while celebrating diversity and income mixing. Scholars and policy makers must reexamine what sustains this image and the power effects produced in order to explain and govern urban space more equitably.
Climate and Culture Change in North America AD 900–1600
By William C. Foster
University of Texas Press, 2012
Climate change is today’s news, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe. In this pathfinding volume, William C. Foster marshals extensive evidence that the heating and cooling of the MWP and LIA also occurred in North America and significantly affected the cultural history of Native peoples of the American Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast.
Correlating climate change data with studies of archaeological sites across the Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast, Foster presents the first comprehensive overview of how Native American societies responded to climate variations over seven centuries. He describes how, as in Europe, the MWP ushered in a cultural renaissance, during which population levels surged and Native peoples substantially intensified agriculture, constructed monumental architecture, and produced sophisticated works of art. Foster follows the rise of three dominant cultural centers—Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, Cahokia on the middle Mississippi River, and Casas Grandes in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico—that reached population levels comparable to those of London and Paris. Then he shows how the LIA reversed the gains of the MWP as population levels and agricultural production sharply declined; Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, and Casas Grandes collapsed; and dozens of smaller villages also collapsed or became fortresses.
College Libraries and Student Culture
What We Now KnowLynda M. Duke
American Library Association, 2012
Colonel Benjamin Stephenson and the History of Early Illinois
Sidney G. Denny, with a foreword by Jason Stacy
Southern Illinois University Press, 2025
WINNER, Certificate of Excellence in “Scholarly Publications” from the Illinois State Historical Society’s 2026 Best of Illinois History Awards!
Rediscovering a forgotten Illinois founding father
In early 2024, the Director of the Colonel Benjamin Stephenson House in Edwardsville, Illinois, discovered an unpublished manuscript among the files of Sidney G. Denny, a longtime Friends of the Colonel Benjamin Stephenson House Board member who had passed away just months before. The manuscript compiled the materials from a decade’s worth of articles Denny had written for the House’s newsletter, the Spectator, on the history of the House, Benjamin Stephenson, and early Illinois—history that, without Denny, would have been lost to time.
Colonel Benjamin Stephenson, a founding father of both the city of Edwardsville and the state of Illinois, played a crucial role in the emergence of Illinois from a territory into the nation’s twenty-first state in 1818. Informed by a treasure trove of primary sources, Colonel Benjamin Stephenson and the History of Early Illinois traces Stephenson from his childhood in 18th-century Pennsylvania to his experiences on the Illinois frontier and, eventually, to his final residence, which is now a museum of his life and times in Edwardsville. The volume also provides a detailed chronicle that connects early Illinois history to the history of westward settlement and to the American Revolution itself.
Denny explores the rich history of Madison County and delves into the complexities of early Illinois and its pioneering leaders, weaving together the lives of various families to reveal the interconnected nature of early Illinois society. His meticulously researched work showcases how the impact of those early days is still visible today.
Community Health Equity
A Chicago ReaderEdited by Fernando De Maio, Raj C. Shah, MD, John Mazzeo, and David A. Ansell, MD
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Constructing the Patriarchal City
Gender and the Built Environments of London, Dublin, Toronto, and Chicago, 1870s into the 1940sMaureen A. Flanagan
Temple University Press, 2018
In the Anglo-Atlantic world of the late nineteenth century, groups of urban residents struggled to reconstruct their cities in the wake of industrialization and to create the modern city. New professional men wanted an orderly city that functioned for economic development. Women’s vision challenged the men’s right to reconstruct the city and resisted the prevailing male idea that women in public caused the city’s disorder.
Constructing the Patriarchal City compares the ideas and activities of men and women in four English-speaking cities that shared similar ideological, professional, and political contexts. Historian Maureen Flanagan investigates how ideas about gender shaped the patriarchal city as men used their expertise in architecture, engineering, and planning to fashion a built environment for male economic enterprise and to confine women in the private home. Women consistently challenged men to produce a more equitable social infrastructure that included housing that would keep people inside the city, public toilets for women as well as men, housing for single, working women, and public spaces that were open and safe for all residents.
Consumed In The City
Observing Tuberculosis At Century'S EndPaul Draus
Temple University Press, 2004
Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style
Helen Walker Linsenmeyer
Southern Illinois University Press, 1976
Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style by Helen Walker Linsenmeyer presents a collection of family recipes created prior to 1900 and perfected from generation to generation, mirroring the delicious and distinctive kind of cookery produced by the mix of people who settled the Illinois Country during this period. Some recipes reflect a certain New England or Southern influence, while others echo a European heritage. All hark back to a simpler style of living, when cooking was plain yet flavorful.
The recipes specify the use of natural ingredients (including butter, lard, and suet) rather than synthetic or ready-mixed foods, which were unavailable in the 1800s. Cooking at the time was pure and unadulterated, and portions were large. Strength-giving food was essential to health and endurance; thus fare was pure, hearty, flavorful, and wholesome.
The many treasures of Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style include
• basic recipes for mead, originally served to the militiamen of Jackson County; sumac lemonade, made the Indian way; root beer, as it was originally made;
• soups of many kinds—from wholesome vegetable to savory sorrel leaf, enjoyed by the Kaskaskia French;
• old-fashioned fried beefsteak, classic American pot roast and gravy, as well as secret marinades to tenderize the tougher but more flavorful cuts of meat;
• methods for preparing and cooking rabbit, squirrel, wild turkey, venison, pheasant, rattlesnake, raccoon, buffalo, and fish;
• over one hundred recipes for wheat breads, sweet breads, corn breads, and pancakes;
• an array of delectable desserts and confections, including puddings, ice cream, taffy, and feathery-light cakes and pies;
• sections on the uses of herbs, spices, roots, and weeds; instructions for making sausage, jerky, and smoked fish and for drying one’s own fruits and vegetables; and household hints on everything from making lye soap to cooking for the sick.
And there are extra-special nuggets, too, for Mrs. Linsenmeyer laces her cookbook with interesting biographical notes on a number of the settlers and the origin of many of the foods they used. There is also a wealth of historical information on lifestyles and cooking before 1900, plus helpful tips on the use of old-fashioned cooking utensils.
A working cookbook complete in its coverage of every area of food preparation, Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style will be used and treasured as much today as its recipes were by families of an earlier century. The recipes are not gourmet, but they are certain to please today’s cooks, especially those interested in using local ingredients and getting back to a more natural way of cooking and eating.
Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves
A Plain-Spoken History of Mid-IllinoisJames Krohe Jr.
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
In Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves, James Krohe Jr. presents an engaging history of an often overlooked region, filled with fascinating stories and surprising facts about Illinois’s midsection.
Krohe describes in lively prose the history of mid-Illinois from the Woodland period of prehistory until roughly 1960, covering the settlement of the region by peoples of disparate races and religions; the exploitation by Euro-Americans of forest, fish, and waterfowl; the transformation of farming into a high-tech industry; and the founding and deaths of towns. The economic, cultural, and racial factors that led to antagonism and accommodation between various people of different backgrounds are explored, as are the roles of education and religion in this part of the state. The book examines remarkable utopian experiments, social and moral reform movements, and innovations in transportation and food processing. It also offers fresh accounts of labor union warfare and social violence directed against Native Americans, immigrants, and African Americans and profiles three generations of political and government leaders, sometimes extraordinary and sometimes corrupt (the “one-horse thieves” of the title). A concluding chapter examines history’s roles as product, recreation, and civic bond in today’s mid-Illinois.
Accessible and entertaining yet well-researched and informative, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves draws on a wide range of sources to explore a surprisingly diverse section of Illinois whose history is America in microcosm.
Corrupt Illinois
Patronage, Cronyism, and CriminalityThomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson
University of Illinois Press, 2015
In Corrupt Illinois, veteran political observers Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson take aim at business-as-usual. Naming names, the authors lead readers through a gallery of rogues and rotten apples to illustrate how generations of chicanery have undermined faith in, and hope for, honest government. From there, they lay out how to implement institutional reforms that provide accountability and eradicate the favoritism, sweetheart deals, and conflicts of interest corroding our civic life.
Corrupt Illinois lays out a blueprint to transform our politics from a pay-to-play–driven marketplace into what it should be: an instrument of public good.
Country and Midwestern
Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk RevivalMark Guarino
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country music, the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary offspring of those scenes.
In Country and Midwestern, veteran journalist Mark Guarino tells the epic century-long story of Chicago’s influence on sounds typically associated with regions further south. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Guarino tells a forgotten story of music, migration, and the ways that rural culture infiltrated urban communities through the radio, the automobile, and the railroad. The Midwest’s biggest city was the place where rural transplants could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, major record labels made Chicago their home and recorded legendary figures like Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry. The National Barn Dance—broadcast from the city’s South Loop starting in 1924—flourished for two decades as the premier country radio show before the Grand Ole Opry. Guarino chronicles the makeshift niche scenes like “Hillbilly Heaven” in Uptown, where thousands of relocated Southerners created their own hardscrabble honky-tonk subculture, as well as the 1960s rise of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which eventually brought national attention to local luminaries like John Prine and Steve Goodman. The story continues through the end of the twentieth century and into the present day, where artists like Jon Langford, The Handsome Family, and Wilco meld contemporary experimentation with country traditions.
Featuring a foreword from Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks and casting a cross-genre net that stretches from Bob Dylan to punk rock, Country and Midwestern rediscovers a history as sprawling as the Windy City—celebrating the creative spirit that modernized American folk idioms, the colorful characters who took them into new terrain, and the music itself, which is still kicking down doors even today.
Creating Chicago's North Shore
A Suburban HistoryMichael H. Ebner
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Creating the Land of Lincoln
The History and Constitutions of Illinois, 1778-1870Frank Cicero Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Crossing Parish Boundaries
Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914-1954Timothy B. Neary
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In this book, Timothy B. Neary reveals the history of Bishop Bernard Sheil’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), which brought together thousands of young people of all races and religions from Chicago’s racially segregated neighborhoods to take part in sports and educational programming. Tens of thousands of boys and girls participated in basketball, track and field, and the most popular sport of all, boxing, which regularly filled Chicago Stadium with roaring crowds. The history of Bishop Sheil and the CYO shows a cosmopolitan version of American Catholicism, one that is usually overshadowed by accounts of white ethnic Catholics aggressively resisting the racial integration of their working-class neighborhoods. By telling the story of Catholic-sponsored interracial cooperation within Chicago, Crossing Parish Boundaries complicates our understanding of northern urban race relations in the mid-twentieth century.
Crossing Segregated Boundaries
Remembering Chicago School DesegregationDionne Danns
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Crossing the Class and Color Lines
From Public Housing to White SuburbiaLeonard S. Rubinowitz and James E. Rosenbaum
University of Chicago Press, 2000
"This book's history of Chicago public housing should be required reading for anyone interested in social policy in the United States."—Jens Ludwig, Social Service Review
"[The authors'] work is rightly cited as one of the important precedents in the field. . . . This is a remarkable, unassailable accomplishment and this book is an important record of their scholarly contribution."—John M. Goering, Ethnic and Racial Studies
Crossing the Gap
Healing Epidemics and Inequalities in a Divided CityDavid A. Ansell, MD
University of Chicago Press, 2026
A doctor, a disinvested neighborhood, and a radical experiment to close America’s death gap.
Two girls are born in the same Chicago hospital. Their neighborhoods—just seven train stops apart—will shape their futures and help determine how long they live. One will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday. The other will die before sixty-five.
This is the death gap: lives lost too soon. Crossing the Gap asks how a city with world-class hospitals can tolerate an epidemic of premature death—and tells the story of the people fighting to end it.
In his landmark book The Death Gap, physician and health equity leader David A. Ansell exposed how structural racism and poverty shorten lives. He moves beyond diagnosis in Crossing the Gap to explore what happens when a major medical center joins forces with pastors, community organizers, residents, and young leaders on Chicago’s West Side to redefine what a hospital owes its neighbors. Part medical memoir and part urban chronicle, Crossing the Gap follows groundbreaking initiatives such as West Side United and the Sankofa Wellness Village as they confront decades of disinvestment and work to build healthier communities.
Through stories of collaboration, courage, conflict, and community leadership, Ansell shows how neighborhood voices, rigorous data, and moral imagination can transform health systems from bystanders into partners for change—not just in one city but throughout the nation.
Crucibles of Black Empowerment
Chicago's Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold WashingtonJeffrey Helgeson
University of Chicago Press, 2014
In Crucibles of Black Empowerment, Jeffrey Helgeson recounts the rise of African American political power and activism from the 1930s onward, revealing how it was achieved through community building. His book tells stories of the housewives who organized their neighbors, building tradesmen who used connections with federal officials to create opportunities in a deeply discriminatory employment sector, and the social workers, personnel managers, and journalists who carved out positions in the white-collar workforce. Looking closely at black liberal politics at the neighborhood level in Chicago, Helgeson explains how black Chicagoans built the networks that eventually would overthrow the city’s seemingly invincible political machine.
Crusade Against Slavery
Edward Coles, Pioneer of FreedomKurt E. Leichtle and Bruce G. Carveth
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
Rejecting slavery from a young age, Coles's early wishes to free his family's slaves initially were stymied by legal, practical, and family barriers. Instead he went to Washington, D.C., where his work in the White House was a life-changing blend of social glitter, secretarial drudge, and distasteful political patronage. Returning home, he researched places where he could live out his ideals. After considerable planning and preparation, he left his family's Virginia tobacco plantation in 1819 and started the long trip west to Edwardsville, Illinois, pausing along the Ohio River on an emotional April morning to free his slaves and offer each family 160 acres of Illinois land of their own. Some continued to work for Coles, while others were left to find work for themselves. This book revisits the lives of the slaves Coles freed, including a noted preacher and contributor to the founding of what is now the second-oldest black Baptist organization in America.
Crusade Against Slavery details Coles's struggles with frontier life and his surprise run and election to the office of Illinois governor as well as his continuing antislavery activities. At great personal cost, he led the effort to block a constitutional convention that would have legalized slavery in the state, which resulted in an acrimonious civil suit brought on by his political enemies, who claimed he violated the law by not issuing a bond of emancipation for his slaves. Although initially convicted by a partisan jury, Coles was vindicated when the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the decisions of the lower courts. Through the story of Coles's moral and legal battles against slavery, Leichtle and Carveth unearth new perspectives on an institution that was on unsure footing yet strongly ingrained in the business interests at the economic base of the fledgling state.
In 1831, after less than a decade in Illinois-and after losing a bid for Congress-Coles left for Philadelphia, where he remained in correspondence with Madison about the issue of slavery. Drawing on previous incomplete treatments of Coles's life, including his own short memoir, Crusade Against Slavery includes the first published analysis of Madison's failure to free his slaves despite his plans to do so through his will and a fascinating exploration of Coles's struggle to understand Madison's inability to live up to the ideals both men shared.
Cultivating the City
The Long Struggle to Put Land to UseNate Ela
University of Chicago Press, 2027
A story of law and social policy in a place you might not expect: community gardens and urban farms.
Though Chicago is a city of legendary skyscrapers and dense apartment blocks, it is also a city of wide-open tracts of land. This surprising juxtaposition can be viewed as an opportunity, in that available land can become a food source for urban dwellers, especially those experiencing poverty or limited access to grocery stores. But most empty land in Chicago remains empty — why? In Cultivating the City, sociologist and legal scholar Nate Ela examines the history of Chicago’s urban farms and gardens, their promotion as a tool to support the poor and unemployed, and their repeated failure to take root as a permanent part of Chicago’s landscape.
Ela’s fresh take on contemporary urban agriculture features a new perspective on social policy and urban governance. For hundreds of years, social reformers have worked to address poverty and unemployment by letting people use land to grow food. Reformers experimented with the possibilities of property use, including deals to match gardeners with public or private land, proposals to let growers use land without owners’ permission, and the transformation of private land into municipal gardens. By exposing the dynamics of this longstanding but long-overlooked form of social policy in Chicago, Ela offers a new strategy for cultivating cities that are productive, resilient, and just.
Cultures In Conflict
A Documentary History of the Mormon War in IllinoisJohn Hallwas and Roger Launius
Utah State University Press, 1999
Curators
Behind the Scenes of Natural History MuseumsLance Grande
University of Chicago Press, 2017
At the heart of it all from the very start have been curators. Yet after three decades as a natural history curator, Lance Grande found that he still had to explain to people what he does. This book is the answer—and, oh, what an answer it is: lively, exciting, up-to-date, it offers a portrait of curators and their research like none we’ve seen, one that conveys the intellectual excitement and the educational and social value of curation. Grande uses the personal story of his own career—most of it spent at Chicago’s storied Field Museum—to structure his account as he explores the value of research and collections, the importance of public engagement, changing ecological and ethical considerations, and the impact of rapidly improving technology. Throughout, we are guided by Grande’s keen sense of mission, of a job where the why is always as important as the what.
This beautifully written and richly illustrated book is a clear-eyed but loving account of natural history museums, their curators, and their ever-expanding roles in the twenty-first century.
Cut from Whole Cloth
An Immigrant ExperienceRichard J. Franke
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Franke draws on extensive primary sources to create an engrossing narrative of his Catholic grandfather and Lutheran grandmother as they flee religious intolerance and economic adversity in Germany and immigrate to America in 1884. They settle in Springfield, Illinois, where they start a family and business and live out the American dream—with its attendant perils and promises—as their business evolves from a tailor's shop to a modern, thriving dry cleaner. Their story is one of strife, frustration, and success. Franke chronicles how they struggle to raise a family in a foreign culture with radically different values, as the old world morals that fuel their prosperity give rise to ancient family tensions that haunt each new generation.
By turns charming, wrenching, and poetic, Cut from Whole Cloth is an intensely personal yet timeless tale that will appeal to nearly every descendant of immigrants.