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