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Book review: “Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition” by Mark Walczynski

The expedition of discovery that Louis Jolliet, a merchant-explorer, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, undertook with five other men in 1673 was a pivotal moment in the history of North America. And it was an important factor, much later, in the establishment of Chicago. They traveled by canoe from Green Bay, down river routes…

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Book review: “Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City” by Thomas Leslie

Thomas Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 is an impressive and important book that will take its place with those works providing the deepest insights into what makes Chicago, Chicago. Books such as Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, Boss by Mike Royko, Chicago: City on the Make by Nelson Algren, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life…

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Book Review: “Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win: Five Decades of Resistance in Chicago’s Uptown Community” by Helen Shiller

Helen Shiller — a longtime radical activist and the new alderman in Chicago’s 46th ward — turned 40 on November 24, 1987.  Two days later, she went to City Hall for an 11 a.m. meeting with the man who was something of a mentor to her, Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor.  And she…

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Chicago history: Rediscovering the art of the much-demonized Chicago wheeler-dealer Charles Tyson Yerkes

In the fall of 2003, Sebastian Smee, the art critic of the Daily Telegraph in London, described a mid-19th century painting by British artist J. M. W. Turner as “an almost unbelievable vision of swirling blue, orange and white light thrusting through fog.”  His colleague, Rachel Campbell-Johnston of The Times of London, wrote that the…

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Interview: Sparrows, Hutches and Growing into an Ending, Sandra Cisneros Discusses Her New Novella

As Sandra Cisneros’s new gem-like novella Martita, I Remember You opens, Corina is using a scraper and a blowtorch to strip generations of varnish off a dining room hutch in the three-flat that she and her husband own near a Chicago expressway.  “The varnish peels off in stubborn ribbons, a practice in patience.” Cisneros was…

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Book review: “City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History,” edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan, Ann Durkin Keating and William C. Barnett

A little more than a century ago, in one of the world’s largest cities, Chicagoans lived a lot closer to nature than we do today — as in closer to animals and their smells and their manure and urine. Consider that, in 1918, some 2,000 dairy cows were being milked each morning in the city.…

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