Departments

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Chicago

  • 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.”

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    7/7/2021

    Chicago Versus Lake Michigan

    The history of Chicago is defined by efforts to tame water for navigation, sanitation, and drinking. Climate change is raising the stakes of that battle. 

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    6/8/2021

    When Monuments Go Bad

    Chicago is engaging in a broad and unprecedented study of the city's monuments and the political and cultural implications of memorialization in public space. Will this help avoid the bitter controversies and protests that have erupted in other cities? 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    5/21/2021

    Some Representations of Native Americans Erase their History

    by Hayley Negrin

    "Visibly racist and inaccurate representations of Indigenous people in public spaces send a message to Indigenous people everywhere that they are not in control of their own destiny, that they are not permitted to define themselves. The process of conquest continues."

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    3/12/2021

    A Mansion Sale Built on the Myth of a Notorious Cow

    The Chicago Fire of 1871 has been the wellspring of plenty of myths. A real estate listing for a southside mansion is just the latest. Historians Carl Smith and Ann Durkin Keating comment.