Miles Harvey. The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020. You might know something about Brook Farm, Massachusetts, and New Harmony, Indiana—but what about Beaver Island, Michigan? You have heard of Joseph Smith and Brigham More
Timothy B. Neary. Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago: 1915–1954. Chicago, University of Chicago Press (2016). The author makes good on his promise to tell “the little-known and largely forgotten story of Catholic interracialism prior to the modern civil rights movement.” Founded in 1930, the Catholic Youth Organization brought together boys 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
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
Abraham Lincoln, author; William E. Barton, editor. The Life and Public Service of General Zachary Taylor: An Address. Los Angeles, Library of Alexandria (2015). This book was originally published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin in 1922 with the Reverend More
Dominic A. Pacyga. Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press (2015). “Context” for historians generally refers to the wider scene that helps to explain something specific. “Context” for this important More
Joseph Alan Gustaitis. Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press (2016). This fascinating book looks at World War I as a time of transformation for Chicago. Employment needs are a particular theme More
John Zukowsky. Building Chicago: The Architectural Masterworks. New York, Rizzoli (2016). What sets this book apart is not only Zukowsky’s interpretation of the two-century sweep of Chicago architecture, but the way that he sheds light on the past few decades. He sees historicism More
Tessa Morrison. Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy. Burlington, Vermont, Routledge (2016). What Tessa Morrison brings to the subject of unbuilt utopian cities is an analysis of the various political philosophies underlying each one. These More