Abraham Lincoln, His Final Address, and the American Founding

April 8, 2026

Jacob K. Friefeld

Next week marks the 161st anniversary of the day the most famous midwesterner, Abraham Lincoln, died. Four days before his death, Lincoln stood on the White House’s north portico ready to address a celebratory crowd excited about the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s rebel army. Lincoln didn’t know this would be his last speech.

The speech isn’t impressive, but it displays important Lincoln hallmarks that held true to the end: his ability to shape public opinion and his fidelity to the founding principles of the American republic…Read More

Lingering over Midwestern Stories, in Midwestern Places, by Midwestern People

March 25, 2026

By Andy Oler

My introduction to the field of Midwestern literature centered on the fiction and poetry published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors typically considered Midwestern were mostly white, largely male, and often writing about rural or small-town life. James Shortridge has shown us that the idea of the Middle West came about at a time of rural modernization, allowing the region to project both a pastoral ideal and an image of growing industry. By exploring the socioeconomic and cultural shifts in different parts of the Midwest, authors like Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather became the region’s exemplars, and when you add Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, James Whitcomb Riley, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, and others, a stereotype begins to calcify.

While the white, male, and rural elements of this stereotype persist as key aspects of the Midwestern imaginary, it does not take much digging to understand that they are false…Read More

The Dark Side of Reform: Child Labor, School Reform, and Inequality in Public Education

March 11, 2026

By Ruby Oram

Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 demonstrates how a girl-centered school reform movement in Chicago cemented inequalities of gender, race, and class in public education.

This history starts in 1888 when a twenty-five-year-old “lady reporter” for the Chicago Times, Helen Cusack, went undercover as a factory girl in Chicago’s garment district. Disguised in “the rags of poverty,” Cusack spent a month working alongside immigrant daughters as young as twelve who stitched corsets, trimmed winter cloaks, and sewed buttons on blouses. She spoke to girl seamstresses with “deathly pale faces” who worked elbow to elbow on a diet of cold coffee and black bread. She interviewed twelve-year-old girls in another “slave-grinding hell-hole” who worked ten-hour days wearing shoes held together with thread and tape. For a month, Cusack’s accounts of “miserable girlhood” appeared daily on the front pages of the Chicago Times and the New York World under the sensational title “City Slave Girls.”…Read More

Making Michigan Home: Mexican Americans Bridging the Rural Urban Experience

February 25, 2026

By Brett T. Olmsted

Making Michigan Home examines how Mexicans and Mexican Americans dynamically engaged in placemaking in Michigan (and the Great Lakes Region more broadly) from the 1920s to the 1970s to confront the social, economic, and political exclusion they encountered in the north. Michigan Mexicanos actively negotiated, constructed, and molded the space around them, redefining how and where they belonged. Because Michigan Mexicanos never constituted a numerically significant population in any one area, they pursued inclusion via leisure spaces and labor unionism. By gathering together for activities such as celebrations, sports, movies, and music, Mexicanos claimed physical and social space within Michigan’s cities and towns, connected with other Mexicano communities across the state, and constructed their own sense of identity and community…Read More

An Immigrant Institution Reckons with its Past

February 11, 2026

By Jane Simonsen

Augustana College was founded in Chicago in 1860 as an effort to make a place for Swedish-Lutheran immigrants to maintain their faith traditions in a divided nation. By 1875, the seminary and college had settled on the banks of the Mississippi in Rock Island, Illinois, cultivating a campus where students could remain rooted in their Swedish Lutheran identity while navigating in a new homeland.

As ICE raids in Chicago and Minneapolis draw attention to the immigrant Midwest, many are struggling to understand how belonging is defined in a region so recently settled by immigrants like those who founded Augustana. Contributors to the volume Called to Reckon (all former or current Augustana students, faculty, and administrators) consider how well an institution founded by immigrants has lived out its historical commitment and current mission to be both “rooted and open.”…Read More

Sisters of Influence: A Biography of Zina, Amy, and Rose Fay

January 28, 2026

By Andrea Friederici Ross

Chicago in the 1880s grew faster than an overfed piglet. A seemingly endless daily roundabout of steamboats, carriages, and railroads brought goods, food, and new residents to help shape a city that had been wiped out in 1871’s catastrophic fire.

It was the fastest growing city in the world, a manufacturing mecca, a crucial hub of distribution in the relatively new Northwest, and a chaotic mess. Melusina Fay Peirce, an 1878 arrival accustomed to the more decorous rhythms of Cambridge, Massachusetts, described Chicago as “an enormous cabbage which might at any time turn into an equally enormous rose.” 

Much has been written about the agricultural implements, meat-packing, steel, and other business enterprises that made Chicago a vital city. Perhaps less well known is the social evolution that took place alongside…Read More

A History of Bicycling in Illinois

January 14, 2026

By Christopher Sweet

The 1890s were the golden era of bicycling in the United States, and around the globe. This nearly forgotten boom saw a massive surge of public interest in bicycle riding. Nowhere was this boom more pronounced than in Illinois. As documented in A History of Bicycling in Illinois: 160 Years of Booms and Busts, Illinois during this time period rose to prominence as the leading state for bicycle manufacturing and bicycle culture writ large. While the book mostly focuses on this boom period, it also offers a comprehensive history from the appearance of the first bicycle in Illinois in 1868, up to current times. The excerpt below introduces Chapter 7: Scorchers and Cracks: Bicycle Racing.

By the mid-1890s, a good portion of the country had gone mad over bicycles, and bicycle races might have been the pinnacle of the insanity. Top racers were major celebrities and earned salaries that would make most modern professional bicyclists jealous. The best long-distance bicycle racer of the day was Chicagoan Charlie Miller. Born in Germany, Miller moved to Chicago in 1892. He was promptly caught up in the bicycle craze and learned to ride on Chicago’s streets and racetracks. His promise as a racer was first noted in 1892, when he set the American amateur five-mile record with a time of 10:07 (29.5 mph). Miller soon figured out that his real potential lay in riding longer distances…Read More

Eckie’s Greatest Game

November 19, 2025

By Chris Serb

On November 30, 1905, Walter Eckersall found himself, and his football team, in a tough spot. The University of Chicago quarterback was pinned on his own 7-yard-line, late in a scoreless tie against mighty Michigan. “Eckie” initially planned to play things safe, calling signals for a punt.

From the corner of his eye, Eckersall saw the Michigan defense cheat slightly to the right, hoping to block his kick. The ball was snapped; Eckie stepped forward, as if to punt; then at the last second, he sprang to his left, sneaking into the newly-vacated space and dashing 20 yards for some much-needed breathing room.

Eckie was used to big moments like this. At Hyde Park High School he had won league, state, and even national titles in football, baseball, and track, becoming Chicago’s first-ever schoolboy superstar. As a college sophomore, he made first-team All-American –a rare honor then for a non-Eastern player, although a close loss to Michigan spoiled the Maroons’ dreams of a “Big Nine” (predecessor to the Big Ten) title...Read More

Capone’s Big Brother was a G-Man

November 5, 2025

By Tom Chorneau

Editor’s note: This month our essay is a bit different. Tom Chorneau’s new book, Mrs. Cook & the Klan, is out and available to purchase. However, his essay deals with his research into the Capone family, particularly Al Capone’s brother who pursued a career in law enforcement.

Most students of the Chicago beer wars of the 1920s are probably aware that Al Capone’s oldest brother was a celebrated prohibition agent. What is less well-known is how the world came to learn that Richard “Two Guns” Hart was also Vincenzo “James” Capone.

The oldest of Gabriele and Teresa Capone’s nine children, Vincenzo was born in Naples before the family immigrated to New York in 1895. He was different right from the start. He wanted to be called Jimmy and spent whatever pocket money he had going to the movies. He loved westerns. His favorite star was William S. Hart, and he fantasized about one day becoming an actor in Hollywood. Uninterested in the culture of the streets, which had thoroughly absorbed several of his younger brothers, Vincenzo instead to spend his free time at Coney Island, visiting the farm animals and especially the horses.

Vincenzo left New York at age 16 and made his way to the Midwest, where he worked a number of odd jobs, including at one point, as a stagehand for a circus. He served in the Army during World War I, came home, and married a Nebraska girl in the fall of 1919. By then, he was going by the name of Richard James Hart…Read More

Fugitive Civil Rights Pedagogy: The Life and Music of Ella Jenkins

October 22, 2025

By Gayle F. Wald

In 1957, Ella Jenkins, a self-described “rhythm specialist” from the South Side of Chicago, traveled to New York City to meet Moe Asch, the famously irascible head of Folkways Records. She was carrying a demo disk titled “Call and Response Rhythmic Group Singing.” It consisted of four short tracks on which Jenkins, playing the conga drum, led Chicago middle-schoolers through simple chants.

Asch was protective of the Folkways imprimatur. Just a few years later, in 1961, he would turn away another Midwesterner, a scruffy young Woody Guthrie-wannabe named Bob Dylan. But in Jenkins’ work Asch immediately recognized something that could serve his vision of Folkways as a purveyor of substantive—not treacly or condescending—children’s music. Her songs were intentionally simple and “unpolished,” incorporating the voices of untrained child singers. They drew on African American folk music, including play songs and work songs. And counter to the music taught to children in most U.S. schools at the time, they emphasized rhythm over melody. One song, “Tah-boo,” consisted entirely of made-up words, drawing listeners’ attention to the pleasures of sounds and rhythms in and of themselves…Read More

The Sacred and the Profane: Politics in Chicago, 1870-2023

October 8, 2025

By Dominic A. Pacyga

Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine covers the period 1870 to 2023 in an attempt to show the long evolution of what has come to be known as the Chicago way of politics. It further emphasizes the religious, specifically Judeo-Christian, communal roots of Chicago’s political machine and the eventual withering of those roots over time, including the impact of the Vatican II Ecumenical Council. The book emphasizes the political machine’s deep foundation in Irish Catholic and East European Jewish neighborhoods. Both Jewish and Catholic communalism played key roles in the creation of machine politics, this interwoven social and cultural history is essential for understanding Chicago politics… Read More

Writing Greater Minnesota

September 24, 2025

By Patrick Hicks

My latest book was a joy to write. It took three years to finish and I traveled some 6,500 miles around my home state of Minnesota. Although I never really saw myself as a travel writer, that’s exactly what I’ve become with this book. The project, to my ongoing surprise, came to me like an accidental gift.

I’m primarily known as a novelist and for the last fifteen years I’ve written three books about the Holocaust: The Commandant of Lubizec (2014), In the Shadow of Dora (2020), and most recently, Across the Lake (2023). These novels required an incredible amount of research and time. I’ve interviewed survivors, read scores of books, and done many research trips to concentration camps across Germany and Poland in order to get the history correct. In other words, everything I wrote was about the murderous events that took place in Europe between 1933 and 1945. However, you can only spend so much time in the darkness before you need to move back into the light. For my own mental health, I needed to turn my attention elsewhere. But what to write about? What new direction to take? …Read More

Ephemeral City: World’s Fair from the Visitor’s Perspective

September 10, 2025

By Lindsay Fullerton

Ephemeral City: A People’s History of Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair presents a never-before-seen history of the 1933-34 A Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago through the eyes of its visitors. In prioritizing visitors’ voices and archives, this book has two interrelated goals. First, it adds the much-needed perspectives of everyday people to the broader history of this world’s fair and the interwar era. Second, it shows how visitors to A Century of Progress selected, crafted, and interpreted their own experiences of the Fair, while also critically grappling with complex messaging from Fair management and other third parties inside and outside the fairgrounds….Read More

Motherhood, Grief, and “Mental Aberration:” The Suicide of Estelle Johnson

August 27, 2025

By Sarah E. Lirley

Death is a fascinating historical topic and coroner’s inquests into unexpected or suspicious deaths are even more so. I examined 120 such inquests for my book, Sudden Deaths in St. Louis: Coroner Bias in the Gilded Age. The book is divided into six chapters, with each one focusing on a different cause of death, as determined by investigating coroners: natural causes, alcoholism, suicide, abortion, domestic homicides, and workplace accidents. By interrogating these different categories of coroner’s verdicts to understand how and why coroners made their decisions, it is apparent that verdicts were not uniform, but, rather, varied by coroner, as well as the reputation and social connections of the deceased. Each chapter highlights two coroners’ inquests found in my research—one typical and one atypical case…Read More

The West Begins

August 13, 2025

By Pamela Smith Hill

By The Shores of Silver Lake, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fifth Little House novel, is a pivotal book in the series. Not only does Wilder shift audiences in this book—from middle grade readers to young adults—she moves the fictional Ingalls family to Dakota Territory, where in her words, “The West Begins.”

We now think of the Dakotas as part of the Upper Midwest, but in 1879, when the real Charles Ingalls and family moved west from Minnesota, Dakota Territory was the West. Wilder retained this geographic definition when she wrote her fictional Little House books in the 1930s and early 1940s. In a chapter entitled “The West Begins,” Pa observes, “This is a different country. I can’t tell you how exactly, but this prairie is different. Feels different”…Read More