Illinois Books

Rose has written an important book that should be read by all people interested in work and justice. By carefully examining shop floor activism at the mill and life in the Duquesne community, Rose reveals the challenges of forming a union in a key industry beset by a working class divided by skill, ethnicity, and race. Based on the most impressive archival research I have ever encountered, this books stands as a signal achievement in the profession. It is an important story well told! Buy this book!

One of the finest entries in Collins' nate Heller series. Publishes at what I consider the character's high water mark.

It is unfortunte that this book is out of print. Bring It Back!

This book of X. Zubiri is perhaps the most excellent philosophical cosmology of de twentieth century.

An Early Encounter with Tomorrow won the 1998 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society. From the Society's press release, this book meets "the highest standards of imaginative scholarship", "makes available much new information", and "interpretations cross disciplinary lines and point the way to new approaches." "Arnold Lewis demonstrates and analyzes the cultural importance of the Columbian Exposition and of the skyscrapers in Chicago's Loop....The major theme is Chicago's international importance in the transformation of Western culture at the end of the 19th century. Europeans who endtered the Loop walked int a real future, not a vision of one. Exhilarated or disquieted, they acknowledged Chicago's central district as the 'Museum of the present.' The minor theme is the usefulness for historians to study the encounter between the established and the new, the collision between old world assumptions and new world realities, not only in the Loop but also in the Columbian Exposition." From Meredith Clausen's April 1998 review in the American Historical Review, "Carefully researched, well-documented, clearly organized, and beautifully written, Lewis's book should be required reading for anyone in the field of American history, cultural studies, and women's studies as well as architectural history. It is cultural history at its best."

If you love architecture and want to understand the birth of modernism and tall buildings in America, and uniqueness of the Chicago school of architecture -- the inspiration for generations of American architects including Sullivan's student Frank Lloyd Wright -- you have to have this book. It is a gorgeous work of art, the design of the book is so simple and compelling, the large plate photographs do justice to both the beauty and ingenuity of the architecture as well as the architectural photography. For lovers of art books, architecture, black and white photographs, for those who want to own a book as a piece of art, this is a wise investment. I know I treasure it -- reading it is like taking a journey to the past, one in which American architects still dared to dream.

Now in a revised and updated second edition, Camille Stagg's The Eclectic Gourmet Guide To Chicago is a reliable and informative guide to more than two hundred of Chicago's top restaurants. Rated and ranked, each restaurant receives a complete, one-page, in-depth description of its best dishes, atmosphere and service. The restaurants are indexed by cuisine, quality, value, and location, with maps divided by geographic zone to locate the restaurants for easy planning by locals or out-of-towners. All pertinent information is provided including hours, reservation, credit card, dress, and parking information. Of special value is the "best picks" section for everything from burgers to desserts to delis. If you are going to be spending time in Chicago, get hold of a copy of Camille Stagg's The Eclectic Gourmet Guide To Chicago to make culinary and dining memories you won't soon forget.

Reynolds, a Texan, simply read what Southern newspapers were writing in the final year or so before the war began. Through thousands of articles in hundreds of papers, Reynolds showed that southern editors talked big about remaining in the union, provided northerners suppressed abolitionism and refrained from electing anyone who favored hindering the expansion of slavery into newly-acquired western territories. Once they realized that the Republican Party came to represent much of northern opinion, southerners felt their slave-based economy and lifestyle was threatened. Led by South Carolina--then a black-majority state--the south seceded rather than risk losing the slave-based society. This book takes the post-war revisionism--that the secession was about tariffs and constitutional abstractions and not slavery--and exposes it all as bunk. As this book shows through the multitude of newspapers and political speeches of the time--southern voices all--the south was obsessed with slavery, to the point of fetishism. Editors thought nothing of threatening the lives of those who disagreed with their hard-line, abolition-hating views. Many called for the lynching of suspected abolitionists, which is exactly what happened repeatedly during the summer of 1860. Reynolds argues at the end that editors contributed to the enthusiasm for disunion in the south. I might argue with that. I believe the editors, most of whom were desperate for a paying readership, simply went with the (white) mood of the times. Like their political representatives, those who were located in areas with many slaves favored secession, and those in areas with few slaves (western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina) were either tepid supporters or outright opponents of secession. Much as they would like to, modern southern partisans cannot argue with the words--and deeds--of their forbears. It needs to be said bluntly and without ambiguity--had there been no slavery, there would have been no mass secession and no war. The South said as much in its own words, on paper, thousands of times over. Yes, there was tremendous Northern hypocrisy and cruelty in the way the North waged war. But the sins of your enemies does not absolve you of your own wickedness. Something to remember before flying the Confederate flag in full view of black Americans. This book needs to be required reading in all journalism schools.

Because I am not a French historian, I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book! Sarah Curtis has produced a fascinating look at the inner workings of Catholic education in France after the Revolution. Historians will, of course, rejoice in this book, but anyone who is the product of "old style" Catholic education will also find much here that is valuable and surprising. For example, Curtis quotes the 1896 annual report of the Comite des Ecoles Libres of Lyon: "It is well to know spelling and arithmetic, but it less useful to know how to spell words than to know how one must live." The impact of this philosophy, Curtis convincingly demonstrates, left an enduring imprint on French education and culture. Curtis's lively prose adds to the book's overall appeal.

This is an excellent booklet on fossil hunting. It gives you a background on fossils, tips on where to look for fossils, and the tools that will be needed. The booklet then gives you information on common Illinois fossils via text and pictures.

I would recommend this booklet to anyone interested in fossil hunting.

This book was a great reading experience for me. Part of my job is to teach electric utility system operators. I always try to give them some background in the history of the business and how their job evolved through the years. Professor Platt used Commonwealth Edison and Chicago for his model of how electricity changed life in America. Chicago was on the cutting edge more so than other cities because of the Great Fire of 1871. The downtown area had to be totally rebuilt so this offered an open-field opportunity to try the new electric technology.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in American urban development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though the book focuses on Chicago, the same pattern would hold true for other large American cities. Professor Platt has done an outstanding job of research. This is a treasure trove of charts, graphs and other data that show how the industry grew from several independent lighting companies competing against each other in the 1880s, into the beginning of an interconnected super-power system by the 1920s.

The author provides a lot of material on Samuel Insull, the unsung hero of the business. Insull was the Henry Ford of electric power mass-production. He had the vision and financial genius to set up the model for the industry that existed until the 1990s when deregulation came around. It is largely thanks to Insull that we have the system we take for granted today. Insull was involved in scandal late in life. He made powerful political enemies by donating huge sums of money to favorable candidates, in one case over $125,000 to a U.S. Senator-elect from Illinois. This would-be senator was denied his seat in the Senate when it was revealed how Insull had helped him get elected. Insull was eventually indicted for mail fraud for which he was acquitted, but not before it ruined him financially. One cannot study the history of the electric utility business without studying Insull.

The book is not a dry read by any means. The writing is brisk and moves at a good pace. Because of my unique interest in ComEd history, I was constantly pausing to make notes in the margins or to just reflect on how certain installations still existing today got their start. I'm sure I'll be referring to this book many times to research questions about the history of the business.