One of Chicago's landmark attractions, Graceland Cemetery
chronicles the city's sprawling history through the stories of its
people. Local historian and Graceland tour guide Adam Selzer
presents ten ...walking tours covering almost the entirety of the
cemetery grounds. While nodding to famous Graceland figures from
Marshall Field to Ernie Banks to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Selzer
also leads readers past the vaults, obelisks, and other markers
that call attention to less recognized Chicagoans like:
Jessie Williams de Priest, the Black wife of a congressman
whose 1929 invitation to a White House tea party set off a storm of
controversy;
Engineer and architect Fazlur Khan, the Bangladeshi American
who revived the city's skyscraper culture;
The still-mysterious Kate Warn (listed as Warn on her
tombstone), the United States' first female private detective.
Filled with photographs and including detailed maps of each tour
route, Graceland Cemetery is an insider's guide to one of
Chicago's great outdoor destinations for city lore and history.
In July 1919, an explosive race riot forever changed Chicago. For years, black southerners had been leaving the South as part of the Great Migration. Their arrival in Chicago drew the ire and scorn ...of many local whites, including members of the city's political leadership and police department, who generally sympathized with white Chicagoans and viewed black migrants as a problem population. During Chicago's Red Summer riot, patterns of extraordinary brutality, negligence, and discriminatory policing emerged to shocking effect. Those patterns shifted in subsequent decades, but the overall realities of a racially discriminatory police system persisted. In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. Balto demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection from the police were central to black Chicagoans' lives long before the late-century "wars" on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.
As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty ...shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism. Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship.Baldwin explores an abundant archive of cultural formations where an array of white observers, black cultural producers, critics, activists, reformers, and black migrant consumers converged in what he terms a "marketplace intellectual life." Here the thoughts and lives of Madam C. J. Walker, Oscar Micheaux, Andrew "Rube" Foster, Elder Lucy Smith, Jack Johnson, and Thomas Dorsey emerge as individual expressions of a much wider spectrum of black political and intellectual possibilities. By placing consumer-based amusements alongside the more formal arenas of church and academe, Baldwin suggests important new directions for both the historical study and the constructive future of ideas and politics in American life.
In this collection, local experts use personal narratives and
empirical data to explore the history of Mexican American and
Puerto Rican education in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system.
The ...essays focus on three themes: the historical context of
segregated and inferior schooling for Latina/o/x students; the
changing purposes and meanings of education for Latina/o/x students
from the 1950s through today; and Latina/o/x resistance to
educational reforms grounded in neoliberalism. Contributors look at
stories of student strength and resistance, the oppressive systems
forced on Mexican American women, the criminalization of Puerto
Ricans fighting for liberatory education, and other topics of
educational significance. As they show, many harmful past practices
remain the norm--or have become worse. Yet Latina/o/x communities
and students persistently engage in transformative practices
shaping new approaches to education that promise to reverberate not
only in the city but nationwide.
Insightful and enlightening, Latina/o/x Education in
Chicago brings to light the ongoing struggle for educational
equity in the Chicago Public Schools.
Chicago in Stone and Clay
explores the interplay between the city's most
architecturally significant sites, the materials they're made of,
and the sediments and bedrock they are anchored in. This
...unique geologist's survey of Windy City neighborhoods demonstrates
the fascinating and often surprising links between science, art,
engineering, and urban history.
Drawing on two decades of experience leading popular geology
tours in Chicago, Raymond Wiggers crafted this book for readers
ranging from the region's large community of amateur naturalists,
"citizen scientists," and architecture buffs to geologists,
architects, educators, and other professionals seeking a new
perspective on the themes of architecture and urbanism.
Unlike most geology and architecture books, Chicago in Stone
and Clay is written in the informal, accessible style of a
natural history tour guide, humanizing the science for the
nonspecialist reader. Providing an exciting new angle on both
architecture and natural history, Wiggers uses an integrative
approach that incorporates multiple themes and perspectives to
demonstrate how the urban environment presents us with a rich
geologic and architectural legacy.
Chicago may seem a surprising choice for studying thoroughbred
racing, especially since it was originally a famous harness racing
town and did not get heavily into thoroughbred racing until the
...1880s. However, Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries was second only to New York as a center of both
thoroughbred racing and off-track gambling. Horse Racing the
Chicago Way shines a light on this fascinating, complicated
history, exploring the role of political influence and class in the
rise and fall of thoroughbred racing; the business of racing; the
cultural and social significance of racing; and the impact
widespread opposition to gambling in Illinois had on the sport.
Riess also draws attention to the nexus that existed between horse
racing, politics, and syndicate crime, as well as the emergence of
neighborhood bookmaking, and the role of the national racing wire
in Chicago. Taking readers from the grandstands of Chicago's finest
tracks to the underworld of crime syndicates and downtown
poolrooms, Riess brings to life this understudied era of sports
history.
