The reading list for November, 2024 highlights Chicago history.
If you’re interested in exploring Chicago, check out the Activities in Chicago section of the library’s law school survival guide for student recommendations. The Chicago History Museum has fantastic exhibits and programming, and regular free admission days, including November 11 and 20.
Featured book: 1919 by Eve Ewing.
“The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the “Red Summer” of violence across the nation’s cities, has shaped the last century but is unfamiliar or altogether unknown to many people today. In 1919, her second collection of poems, Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost five hundred injuries— through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, illuminating the thin line between the past and the present.” (from the publisher)
There are some classic books about Chicago, including Nelson Algren’s book-length prose poem Chicago: City on the Make, Studs Terkel’s oral history Division Street: America, an oral history, The Jungle, a novel about the immigrant experience in the meatpacking industry in the early 1900s.
The library also has books about specific parts of Chicago history, from the Great Chicago Fire, the labor movement and Haymarket Square, to the 1968 Democratic convention and trial of the Chicago Eight (or seven, after the trial against Bobby Seale was declared a mistrial), the 1995 heat wave, and environmental justice.
You can learn about Chicago’s public resources. Ghosts in the Schoolyard discusses school closure in Chicago within the context of systemic racism and inequality in Chicago schools. The Origins of the Dual City and High Rise Stories address public housing. The library has two older books about the environmental history: Nature’s Metropolis and Forever Open, Clear, and Free.
Learn about African American history with The Defender, which tells the story of Chicago’s Black newspaper founded in 1905. The South Side is about segregation and also the author’s love for the South Side neighborhood where she grew up. You can also read about how Chicago relates to music in Move On Up, about soul music and Sun Ra’s Chicago, about music and Afrofuturism.
Finally, you can explore other neighborhoods and communities. In Never a City So Real, journalist Alex Kotlowitz created a short tour of Chicago through profiles of people whose stories might otherwise not be told. American Warsaw profiles Chicago’s Polish community. Queer Legacies shares stories from the LGBTQ Library/Archives. Here’s the Deal discusses urban planning through the story of one block.
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