Results by title
480 books match the query 'Chicago' and 12 start with g
Gabriel's Fire
A MemoirLuis Gabriel Aguilera
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Aguilera's memoir is not just an account of race relations and street life in the inner city, nor of the plight of the immigrant and the dilemma of class identity for a "minority" family. Gabriel's Fire also movingly recounts the peculiarly daunting and inspiring moments of a particular age, riddled with confusion, desires, and duties and recorded by an exceptionally observant and articulate young man. Aguilera writes that he "grew into" the English language when he was eleven or twelve, and his recollections reflect his newfound delight with words—the conversations, arguments, taunts, song lyrics, and casual interchanges of his youth are rendered here with an immediacy and directness rare in contemporary memoirs.
Both a picture of American culture of the 1980s and 1990s and a coming-of-age story, Gabriel's Fire counters mainstream and mass-mediated images of the inner city, Hispanic culture, and troubled youth. In its honesty and energy, it is a poignant and compelling story of one man's formative years.
Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform
Mothers' Pensions in Chicago, 1911-1929Joanne L. Goodwin
University of Chicago Press, 1997
This revealing study shows how assumptions about women's roles have historically shaped public policy and sheds new light on the ongoing controversy of welfare reform.
Ghosts in the Schoolyard
Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South SideEve L. Ewing
University of Chicago Press, 2018
That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt.
But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together.
Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike?
Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.
Ghosts of Chicago
StoriesJohn McNally
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Give 'Em Soul, Richard!
Race, Radio, and Rhythm and Blues in ChicagoRichard E. Stamz with Patrick A. Roberts, Foreword by Robert Pruter
University of Illinois Press, 2010
As either observer or participant, radio deejay and political activist Richard E. Stamz witnessed every significant period in the history of blues and jazz in the last century. From performing first-hand as a minstrel in the 1920s to broadcasting Negro League baseball games in a converted 1934 Chrysler to breaking into Chicago radio and activist politics and hosting his own television variety show, the remarkable story of his life also is a window into milestones of African American history throughout the twentieth century.
Dominating the airwaves with his radio show "Open the Door, Richard" on WGES in Chicago, Stamz cultivated friendships with countless music legends, including Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Memphis Slim, and Leonard Chess. The pioneering Chicago broadcaster and activist known as "The Crown Prince of Soul" died in 2007 at the age of 101, but not before he related the details of his life and career to college professor Patrick A. Roberts. Give 'Em Soul, Richard! surrounds Stamz's memories of race records, juke joints, and political action in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood with insights on the larger historical trends that were unfolding around him in radio and American history.
Narrated by Stamz, this entertaining and insightful chronicle includes commentary by Roberts as well as reflections on the unlikely friendship and collaboration between a black radio legend and a white academic that resulted in one of the few existing first-hand accounts of Chicago's post-war radio scene.
Global Decisions, Local Collisions
Urban Life In The New World OrderDavid Ranney
Temple University Press, 2002
Grafters and Goo Goos
Corruption and Reform in ChicagoJames L. Merriner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008
Chicago’s reputation for corruption is the basis of local and national folklore and humor. Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago, 1833–2003 unfolds the city’s notorious history of corruption and the countervailing reform struggles that largely failed to clean it up. More than a regional history of crime in politics, this wide-ranging account of governmental malfeasances traces ongoing public corruption and reform to its nineteenth-century democratic roots. Former Chicago journalist James L. Merriner reveals the battles between corrupt politicos and ardent reformers to be expressions of conflicting class, ethnic, and religious values.
From Chicago’s earliest years in the 1830s, the city welcomed dollar-chasing businessmen and politicians, swiftly followed by reformers who strived to clean up the attendant corruption. Reformers in Chicago were called “goo goos,” a derisive epithet short for “good-government types.” Grafters and Goo Goos contends a certain synergy defined the relationship between corruption and reform. Politicians and reformers often behaved similarly, their separate ambitions merging into a conjoined politics of interdependency wherein the line between heroes and villains grew increasingly faint. The real story, asserts Merriner, has less to do with right against wrong than it does with the ways the cultural backgrounds of politicians and reformers steered their own agendas, animating and defining each other by their opposition.
Drawing on original and archival research, Merriner identifies constants in the struggle between corruption and reform amid a welter of changing social circumstances and customs—decades of alternating war and peace, hardships and prosperity. Three areas of reform and resistance are identified: structural reform of the political system to promote honesty and efficiency, social reform to provide justice to the lower classes, and moral reform to combat vice. “In the matter of corruption and reform, the constants might be stronger than the variables,” writes Merriner in the Preface. “The players, rules, and scorekeepers change, but not the essential game.”
Complemented by eighteen illustrations, Grafters and Goo Goos is rife with shocking and amusing anecdotes and peppered with the personalities of famous muckrakers, bootleggers, mayors, and mobsters. While other studies have profiled infamous Chicago corruption cases and figures such as Al Capone and Richard J. Daley, this is the first to provide an overview appropriate for historians and general readers alike. In examining Chicago’s notorious saga of corruption and reform against a backdrop of social history, Merriner calls attention to our constant problems of both civic and national corruption and contributes to larger discussions about the American experiment of democratic self-government.
Grant Park
The Evolution of Chicago's Front YardDennis H. Cremin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
2014 Illinois State Historical Society Book of the Year
Great American City
Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood EffectRobert J. Sampson
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Great American City
Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood EffectRobert J. Sampson
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Robert J. Sampson’s Great American City presents the fruits of over a decade’s research to support an argument that we all feel and experience every day: life is decisively shaped by your neighborhood.
Engaging with the streets and neighborhoods of Chicago, Sampson, in this new edition, reflects on local and national changes that have transpired since his book’s initial publication, including a surge in gun violence and novel forms of segregation despite an increase in diversity. New research, much of it a continuation of the influential discoveries in Great American City, has followed, and here, Sampson reflects on its meaning and future directions. Sampson invites readers to see the status of the research initiative that serves as the foundation of the first edition—the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN)—and outlines the various ways other scholars have continued his work. Both accessible and incisively thorough, Great American City is a must-read for anyone interested in cutting-edge urban sociology and the study of crime.
Growing Up Chicago
Edited by David Schaafsma, Roxanne Pilat, and Lauren DeJulio Bell, Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea
Northwestern University Press, 2021
The stories evoke childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, nighttime games of ringolevio, and the giant neon Magikist lips that once perched over the expressway, sharing perspectives that range from a young man who dreams of becoming an artist to a single mother revisiting her Mexican roots, from a woman’s experience with sexual assault to a child’s foray into white supremacy. This book memorably explores culture, social identity, and personal growth through the eyes of Chicagoans, affirming that we each hold the ability to shape the places in which we live and write and read as much as those places shape us.
Guide to Chicago's Twenty-First-Century Architecture
Chicago Architecture Center and John Hill
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Chicago's wealth of architectural treasures makes it one of the world's majestic cityscapes. Published in collaboration with the Chicago Architecture Center, this easy-to-use guide invites you to discover the new era of twenty-first-century architecture in the Windy City via two hundred architecturally significant buildings and spaces in the city and suburbs. Features include:
- Entries organized by neighborhood
- Maps with easy-to-locate landmarks and mass transit options
- Background on each entry, including the design architect, name and address, description, and other essential information
- Sidebars on additional sites and projects
- A detailed supplemental section with a glossary, selected bibliography, and indexes by architect, building name, and building type
Up-to-date and illustrated with almost four hundred color photos, the Guide to Chicago's Twenty-First-Century Architecture takes travelers and locals on a journey into an ever-changing architectural mecca.