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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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Book review: “City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934” by Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck

Between Chicago’s two World’s Fairs in 1893 and 1933-34, very few Native Americans lived in and around Chicago. Indeed, the numbers were so low that, in City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 (University of Nebraska Press, 268 pages, $30), historians Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck are able to list each…

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