Departments

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Chicago

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    3/8/2023

    In Chicago, the Political Vibes Echo 1983, but the Politics are Different

    by Gordon Mantler

    Harold Washington's victory in 1983 to become the city's first Black mayor promised a new multicultural coalition politics. Forty years later, that coalition is discouraged and demobilized, and seems unlikely to challenge the entrenched interests that Washington tried to dislodge from power. 

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    1/11/2023

    50 Years at Cook County Hospital Prove Abortion is Healthcare

    by Amy Zanoni

    Abortion rights activists have focused on horror stories of the pre-Roe era as cautionary tales, but the history of public hospitals since Roe shows that real reproductive freedom requires expanded access to care and a robust social safety net. 

  • SOURCE: The Metropole
    3/23/2022

    Planning For The People Y Qué? From Advocacy Planners To Hardcore Punks

    by Mike Amezcua

    "Punk fliers are planning documents. Not the official kind produced by city planning departments, of course, nor the grassroots plans by neighborhood activists resisting investment capital and gentrification. But these fliers contain a planning schema all the same."

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    1/3/2021

    A Blueprint for Leadership from 1980s Chicago

    by Brentin Mock

    Harold Washington faced stiff resistance from his own party when he became Chicago's first Black mayor in 1983; his response stressing public infrastructure and voting rights foreshadowed the Biden administration's efforts to overcome intransigence and obstructionism. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    10/17/2021

    Timuel Black, 102: Historian and Organizer of Black Chicago

    Timuel Black mobilized the political power of the predominantly Black South Side of Chicago, taught others — including a young Barack Obama — how to do the same, and in his final decades compiled oral histories giving voice to his community’s Black working class.

  • SOURCE: Chicago Sun-Times
    10/8/2021

    How the Chicago Fire Changed the City's Architecture

    Chicago-based historians D. Bradford Hunt and Dominic Pacyga argue that the Great Fire of 1871 did impact the city by inaugurating an age of big renewal plans, as well as through the city's prized architecture and parks. 

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    9/9/2021

    In Slasher Film ‘Candyman,’ the Horror Is U.S. Housing Policy

    by Brentin Mock

    “Candyman isn't the only ghost in this show,” says Stanford Carpenter, a cultural anthropologist based in Chicago. “The other ghost is Cabrini-Green. In both cases, the thing that makes them scary is that they were made that way by white systemic racism.”