Author: John W. Boyer Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226835316 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 785
Book Description
An expanded narrative of the rich, unique history of the University of Chicago. One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than one hundred and fifty countries, its impact is far-reaching and long-lasting. With The University of Chicago: A History, John W. Boyer, Dean of the College from 1992 to 2023, thoroughly engages with the history and the lived politics of the university. Boyer presents a history of a complex academic community, focusing on the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the resources and conditions that have enabled the university to sustain itself through decades of change. He has mined the archives, exploring the school’s complex and sometimes controversial past to set myth and hearsay apart from fact. Boyer’s extensive research shows that the University of Chicago’s identity is profoundly interwoven with its history, and that history is unique in the annals of American higher education. After a little-known false start in the mid-nineteenth century, it achieved remarkable early successes, yet in the 1950s it faced a collapse of undergraduate enrollment, which proved fiscally debilitating for decades. Throughout, the university retained its fierce commitment to a distinctive, intense academic culture marked by intellectual merit and free debate, allowing it to rise to international acclaim. Today it maintains a strong obligation to serve the larger community through its connections to alumni, to the city of Chicago, and increasingly to its global community. Boyer’s tale is filled with larger-than-life characters—John D. Rockefeller, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and many other famous figures among them—and episodes that reveal the establishment and rise of today’s institution. Newly updated, this edition extends through the presidency of Robert Zimmer, whose long tenure was marked by significant developments and controversies over subjects as varied as free speech, medical inequity, and community relations.
Author: David Anthony Witter Publisher: Reedy Press LLC ISBN: 1681062569 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
Chicago has thrived for almost two hundred years, growing from a backwoods swamp, to a rail and manufacturing hub, to a light of the new Millennium. While many great structures have been lost or demolished, much of this history still lives on. Within the pages of Oldest Chicago, get to know the history of the Windy City's most iconic buildings and the stories that bring their walls to life. Included are some of the businesses and buildings from the city's inception through the turn of the twentieth century that are examples of Chicago's living history like The First United Methodist Church (1831); The Old Water Tower (1859); and Wrigley Field (1916). Amazingly, many others are still run by the same family members whose dedication has made them not only enduring businesses but living landmarks. These include The Jaeger Funeral Home (1858); Anderson's Books (1875); and The Italian Village Restaurant (1927) among many others. Local historian David Anthony Witter brings his love of the city to this veritable guidebook of the city's buildings, neighborhoods, restaurants, businesses and bars. Learn the personal stories of the faces behind the places that continue to give the "City of Big Shoulders" its historical, ethnic, and entrepreneurial identity.less
Author: Joanne Gazarek Bloom Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 0738577308 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 130
Book Description
Explore Bridgeport, the most political neighborhood in the most political of cities - home to five Chicago mayors and parades of politicians honoring its power at national conventions. Once a Native American village traversed by Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, as Chicago grew the area was called Hardscrabble, then Cabbage Gardens, and finally Bridgeport. Immigrants built it: the Irish dredged a canal and mined a quarry that led to slaughterhouses, cooperages, rolling mills, and breweries that were worked by Germans, Bohemians, Swedes, and Poles. Held dear as the "Heart of Lithuania," muckrakers described parts of it as a heartbreaking jungle. More immigrants came: Italians, Croatians, Mexicans, Chinese. Against the backdrop of prairies, labor strife, gangways, and Joe Podsajdwokiem, this sometimes uneasy mix lived, worked, and voted together. Bridgeport still has streets that defy the city's orderly grid, settlement houses, language stews, and, for each nationality, churches and taverns. Today, it may welcome artists and expensive housing, but on summer nights stoop sitting and rooting for the White Sox remain social obligations.
Author: Eric T. Freyfogle Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022632642X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 237
Book Description
“This is a book about nature and culture,” Eric T. Freyfogle writes, “about our place and plight on earth, and the nagging challenges we face in living on it in ways that might endure.” Challenges, he says, we are clearly failing to meet. Harking back to a key phrase from the essays of eminent American conservationist Aldo Leopold, Our Oldest Task spins together lessons from history and philosophy, the life sciences and politics, economics and cultural studies in a personal, erudite quest to understand how we might live on—and in accord with—the land. Passionate and pragmatic, extraordinarily well read and eloquent, Freyfogle details a host of forces that have produced our self-defeating ethos of human exceptionalism. It is this outlook, he argues, not a lack of scientific knowledge or inadequate technology, that is the primary cause of our ecological predicament. Seeking to comprehend both the multifaceted complexity of contemporary environmental problems and the zeitgeist as it unfolds, Freyfogle explores such diverse topics as morality, the nature of reality (and the reality of nature), animal welfare, social justice movements, and market politics. The result is a learned and inspiring rallying cry to achieve balance, a call to use our knowledge to more accurately identify the dividing line between living in and on the world and destruction. “To use nature,” Freyfogle writes, “but not to abuse it.”
Author: Josiah Seymour Currey Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag ISBN: 3849686949 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 574
Book Description
Maybe there has never been a more comprehensive work on the history of Chicago than the five volumes written by Josiah S. Currey - and possibly there will never be. Without making this work a catalogue or a mere list of dates or distracting the reader and losing his attention, he builds a bridge for every historically interested reader. The history of Windy City is not only particularly interesting to her citizens, but also important for the understanding of the history of the West. This volume is number four out of five and features hundreds of biographies of the most important Chicago citizens.
Author: David Anthony Witter Publisher: ISBN: 9781893121447 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Dozens of the oldest local treasures in Chicago and its suburban and exurban areas are highlighted in this guide, which includes icons such as the city's oldest business, Peacock Jewelers; Merz Apothecary; tavern Schaller’s Pump; the Biograph Theater; and drive-in, Superdawg. Remarkable for having survived demolition and extinction for decades, these beloved landmarks have also helped define the city’s landscape, offering continuity and civic identity across generations. With Chicago having lost Marshall Field’s, Carson Pirie Scott, and many more historic gems in recent years, this book is also a reminder of the value of these familiar faces and a call to preserve them for a future sense of place. Oldest Chicago is about the places that have survived the passage of time. Oldest business: Peacock Jewelers (1838); oldest apothecary: Merz Apothecary (1875); oldest tavern: Schaller's Pump (1889); oldest theater: the Biograph Theater (1914); and oldest drive-in restaurant: Superdawg (1948). In Oldest Chicago, journalist David Witter highlights dozens of the oldest local treasures in Chicago and its suburban and exurban areas. Remarkable for having survived demolition and extinction for decades, these beloved landmarks have also helped define our city's landscape, offering continuity and civic identity across generations. Rather than celebrate the past, many of Chicago's business and political leaders have risen to power by tearing it down. Chicago has lost, and continues to lose, many great civic, architectural, and cultural landmarks. In recent years, Marshall Field's and Carson Pirie Scott have vanished from the city's landscape. Other structures like the Uptown and Ramova Theaters are also in danger of being permanently lost. Oldest Chicago is a reminder of the value of these familiar places and a call to preserve them for a future sense of place. But Oldest Chicago isn't only a history book--it's a guide. Everyone tries the newest...why not try the oldest? Visit the oldest house. Worship at the oldest church. Get on your soapbox at the oldest park. Party at the oldest nightclub. Taste the foods that generations of Chicagoans have savored at the oldest hot dog stand, pizzeria, soda pop maker, ice cream parlor, diner, chili vendor, liquor distributor, soul food restaurant, and bakery. Don't just read about Chicago's history--experience it!
Author: Ann Durkin Keating Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226428982 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
“Sets the record straight about the War of 1812’s Battle of Fort Dearborn and its significance to early Chicago’s evolution . . . informative, ambitious” (Publishers Weekly). In August 1812, Capt. Nathan Heald began the evacuation of ninety-four people from the isolated outpost of Fort Dearborn. After traveling only a mile and a half, they were attacked by five hundred Potawatomi warriors, who killed fifty-two members of Heald’s party and burned Fort Dearborn before returning to their villages. In the first book devoted entirely to this crucial period, noted historian Ann Durkin Keating richly recounts the Battle of Fort Dearborn while situating it within the nearly four decades between the 1795 Treaty of Greenville and the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. She tells a story not only of military conquest but of the lives of people on all sides of the conflict, highlighting such figures as Jean Baptiste Point de Sable and John Kinzie and demonstrating that early Chicago was a place of cross-cultural reliance among the French, the Americans, and the Native Americans. This gripping account of the birth of Chicago “opens up a fascinating vista of lost American history” and will become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the city and its complex origins (The Wall Street Journal). “Laid out with great insight and detail . . . Keating . . . doesn’t see the attack 200 years ago as a massacre. And neither do many historians and Native American leaders.” —Chicago Tribune “Adds depth and breadth to an understanding of the geographic, social, and political transitions that occurred on the shores of Lake Michigan in the early 1800s.” —Journal of American History
Author: Eric Klinenberg Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022627621X Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
The “compelling” story behind the 1995 Chicago weather disaster that killed hundreds—and what it revealed about our broken society (Boston Globe). On July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index—how the temperature actually feels on the body—would hit 126. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. By July 20, over seven hundred people had perished—twenty times the number of those struck down by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Heat waves kill more Americans than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources of the city’s vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a “social autopsy,” examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been. He investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how city government responded, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported and explained these events. Through years of fieldwork, interviews, and research, he uncovers the surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdown that contributed to this human catastrophe as hundreds died alone behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community groups, and public agencies. As this incisive and gripping account demonstrates, the widening cracks in the social foundations of American cities made visible by the 1995 heat wave remain in play in America’s cities today—and we ignore them at our peril. Includes photos and a new preface on meeting the challenges of climate change in urban centers “Heat Wave is not so much a book about weather, as it is about the calamitous consequences of forgetting our fellow citizens. . . . A provocative, fascinating book, one that applies to much more than weather disasters.” —Chicago Sun-Times “It’s hard to put down Heat Wave without believing you’ve just read a tale of slow murder by public policy.” —Salon “A classic. I can’t recommend it enough.” —Chris Hayes
Author: John W. Boyer
Author: David Anthony Witter
Author: John Drury
Author: Joanne Gazarek Bloom
Author: Newberry Library
Author: Eric T. Freyfogle
Author: Josiah Seymour Currey
Author: David Anthony Witter
Author: Ann Durkin Keating
Author: Eric Klinenberg