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…

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…

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…

For a quarter of a century, I’ve used Donald L. Miller’s City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, one of the most popular books of Chicago history, as an important resource for my writing. Published in 1996 by Simon & Shuster, City of the Century is a lively, entertaining…

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…

One of the pleasures of reading Aaron Cohen’s 2019 Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power is its walk down memory lane of the great Chicago-based soul music created over the course of a quarter century, beginning in the late 1950s. If you were alive and in town then — or actually…

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.…

For a few days, I took an unexpected, disconcerting and enthrallingly odd voyage through an unusual life and a mythic Chicago. It began when I was reading a book about the history of soul music in Chicago, and the author mentioned a 1978 movie called Stony Island about a fictional band on the South Side…