Illinois Books

Great book packed full of interesting informationa and facts about the university of Illinis football team. Great photographs and text by linda young. Its one of my favorite books about college football history and one of the most interesting.

When is somebody going to reprint this gripping book. It is elegaic and full of glistening cracks in the bedrock. And yet the lines range wildly back and forth, effervescent with flight, leaving the reader dazzled with a sense of life.

Leslie A. Schwalm's text revolves around enslaved African American women on South Carolina low country rice plantations. Her focus is their transition from slavery to freedom, their push to hasten the demise of slavery, their struggle to achieve and maintain autonomy over their labor, their resistance, and their plight for dignity while they battled for respect in their own households. Schwalm contends that enslaved African American women slowed plantation production and took advantage of every opportunity presented by the Civil War to secure their freedom. Enslaved African American women were expected to be productive field laborers', in fact, they lay at the very heart of South Carolina low country rice plantation labor. With the Civil War approaching, rice agriculture in the South Carolina low country depended primarily on the hands and backs of slave women. Field labor was not the only responsibility these slave women had to keep in mind, they also had to perform motherly and household duties. Domestic production and field labor, Schwalm contends, were central to a slave women's experience. The Civil War presented enslaved African American women with opportunitites to ease the grips of slavery while they contested the terrible conditions on South Carolina low country plantations. This form of resistance eventually became more aggressive. In the early months of freedom, freed women attacked overseers, looted planters houses, destroyed planters property, and draped themselves and their children in their former masters clothing as a sign of protest and changing times. With their freedom seemingly secure, former slave women turned their attention to the control of their labor. They demanded the ability to live and work as they saw fit and seperate from white supervision. They had their own concepts of freedom and were determined to labor as free people and not as slaves. The slave womens family depended upon her work as much as the rice field did. The task system of labor afforded slave! women the opportunity to devote daylight hours to domestic production. This was crucial to family development. Slave women used their "after task time" to hire themselves out, grow their own crop, fish, and make family utensils. Slaves viewed production, independent from plantation production, as a way to elevate their standard of living and exercise control over their daily life. Slave women applied these same principles in a free labor work force after emancipation. The military experience had a dramatic impact on the relationships between freedmen and women. People believed that the military experience equated to manhood. Proving their manhood through military experience was a goal for black soldiers, their advocates and and white officers. This sentiment carried over to post was relationships between free black men and women. Leslie A. Schwalm's " A Hard Fight For We" is critical for painting a more complete picture of rice plantation labor in South Carolina's low country. We see that enslaved women were depended upon heavily and they fought for their recognition.

James J. Lorence (professor emeritus of history, University of Wisconsin-Marathon County) presents A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West is the biography of poet, ordained Congregationalist minister, labor organizer, educator, leftist activist, and political figure Don West, a twentieth-century American advocate for traditional religious values who dedicated himself to building a nonracist, egalitarian south. Chapters meticulously scrutinize West's adolescence, the passion with which he threw himself into his life's work, the ethical and religious roots of his dogged antifascism, and his lifelong determination to defend mountain culture and his advocacy for the rural poor. Extensive notes, a bibliography and an index round out this heavily researched account of a life well and dutifully lived.

"Harold!" captures the exciting years of polical evolution in Chicago from 1983 to 1989. I was part of Harold's administration, working to bring in Asian Americans and immigrants in a city that was limited by racial boundaries. I worked with the photographers who put this together and their images show what words alone cannot: Harold Washington's magic and the movement behind him, of which I became a part, brought Chicago into a modern reality. In addition to the white ethnic base of the city that the old machine brought in, Harold showed that by going beyond the patronage approach and including the excluded would work for everybody. American politics are still driven by personalities and Harold's made this all possible. Latinos and African Americans (as the book notes- Carole Moseley Braun and now Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama)are now mainstream parts of Illinois' politics. Asians are still working at it and Harold's anniversary rededicates that evolution.

The book was awesome! It gives a behind closed doors view of Chicago's First Black mayor. It speaks about everything that affected Mayor Washington politcally. The writing style is fluid and interesting. The author puts you in the story emotional and mentally. If you want an honest view of the demise of the Chicago Machine and the courage of a city to be renewed politically this book is for you!

This book highlights some of the detail of the creation and formation of the railroad. It shows the dedication of some of the founders and the troubles encountered by the many people involved. It has shown the resoucefulness that the IC has possesed and the financial troubles to overcome.

This is a wonderful book! Summerhill's writing is clear as polished glass and his powerful narrative ability invites the reader into a nineteenth-century world rich in detail and, like the dark earth tilled by the farmers who are his subject, fertile with a harvest that in this case has grown out of research and analysis that have taken the author into sources and archival materials that have rarely if ever been looked at with such thoughtful sensitivity. It is a world full of the tensions and turbulence of social, economic and political transformation. Summerhill narrows his focus to three counties in central New York to give us an intimate view of how real people and real families coped with, made sense of, and often resisted these changes.
The book begins in the days when the ink that penned the Constitution was barely dry and some people in Delaware, Ostego and Schharie counties still told first hand stories about the War for Independence and felled trees that just a generation or two before had shaded Iroquois men and women who had recently been shoved out. It is a world, and a generation, innervated by ideals of independence, industry, liberty and the redemptive possibilities of being a stalwart member of a new and virtuous republic. Summerhill shows us that they took these ideals and responsibilities seriously, and consciously transmitted them to their children. But as the momentum of the early republic period quickens, bringing roads, canals and railroads, binding these farming families into larger commercial markets, making them increasingly dependent on capital and strengthening the relatively recent ideology of capitalism and its functionaries (large absentee land owners, banks, merchantile corporations, politicians, etc) these republican ideals often clash with the world around them.
How do these people make sense of and respond to such tensions? How do they reconcile them? When and how do they resist and rebel? How do they preserve their families and communities? How can they take advantage of change and use it to their advantage? And perhaps more fundamentally, how do they survive, feed their children and preserve their integrity as their lives are churned in the mixer of increasing industrialism and an increasingly specialized market and political economy. Summerhill's analysis of these and many others questions is as illuminating as it is entertaining. He refuses to reduce the people living in central New York to pawns or treat them as a mass. Nor does he romanticize them. Instead, he draws out the humanity of various idividuals and families to illustrate the complexity, flexibility and range of responses to show the larger journey over the course of several generations as a new kind of rural America emerges. In doing so, he ties these lives and themes into the even larger story of nineteenth-century America itself.
Summerhill offers some novel conclusions about all this, but he is not dogmatic or heavy-handed. There is enough ambiguity and he has let the men and women speak for themselves enough that the reader is left to decide for him or herself. As such, the book is not only history at its finest, it is an invitation to meditate more reflectively on how we ourselves are living our lives, and what it means to be alive, to be human, in times of change and turmoil.

Along with the chronicle of Lincoln's life, the reader will also discover the spirits of the Lincoln Assassination, the unsolved mystery of John Wilkes Booth, the dark visions of President Lincoln, the documented accounts of Lincoln's sessions with Washington Spiritualists, his obsession with the death of Willie Lincoln, the secrets of the Lincoln Tomb -- and the many haunted places connected to Lincoln's ghost, including Ford's Theater, the mysterious tomb, the Lincoln Home, the White House and much more!

This is the perfect book for history enthusiasts, Lincoln buffs and ghost book readers alike and will make the perfect addition to your collection of "Haunted Illinois" titles!

Also recommended is another outstanding title from Whitechapel Press, "Strange Highways".