Enrich your instruction with Great Chicago Stories, an award-winning suite of twelve historical fiction narratives and supporting classroom resources. Download the narratives, which were written and classroom-tested by local teachers, and corresponding artifact sets. Use the map interactive to see where More
Streamlined design found a welcome home in American kitchens. In the mid-1930s, as the economy began to improve, consumers looked to update their homes. Then as now, most people began with their kitchens, and Chicago supplied the market with a multitude of streamlined products. At the top of the list stood a group of Sunbeam More
In a world of podcasts and online streaming, CHM collections intern Angela Thomas demonstrates that audio cassette tapes are still in use. In this blog post, she summarizes her work identifying and labeling audio content as part of her internship through the DePaul University museum studies certificate program. Just as people do not always remember to More
Last summer, CHM collections intern Cara Caputo worked with collections manager Britta Keller Arendt to continue the ongoing inventory of the Decorative and Industrial Arts collection. This led her to discover just how much investigation working with the collection entails. CHM publications interns Lily Stachowiak and Brendan Narko helped organize and publish this blog post. More
In this blog post, CHM collections intern Chris Johnson writes about his experience processing the collection of The Chicago Reporter under the supervision of senior archivist Julie Wroblewski. Last summer, I interned at the Chicago History Museum via the Black Metropolis Research Consortium’s Archie Motley Archival Internship Program. The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) is a More
M. Jane Johansson, ed. Albert C. Ellithorpe the First Indian Home Guards and the Civil War of the Trans-Mississippi Frontier. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (2016). The title is a mouthful, but the fact is that this intriguing More
The Remembering Dr. King: 1929–1968 exhibition invites students and teachers to walk through a winding gallery featuring of twenty-five photographs depicting key moments in Dr. King’s work and the civil rights movement, with a special focus on his time in Chicago. This classroom resource allows you to bring a portion of the experience into your More
Inside the Collection is a video series that invites you into the Chicago History Museum’s storage spaces to explore unusual, interesting artifacts from our vast collection. In this installment, senior collection manager Britta Keller Arendt shows us the skin of the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. This artifact came to More
Marcia Chatelain. South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration. Durham, NC, Duke University Press (2015). This is a very important study of lives of black girls during the Great Migration. At its core are the girls themselves, More
Ethan Michaeli. The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America from the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (2016). This history is beautifully written and exquisitely researched. More