The Urban History Seminar series feature a scholarly presentation followed by lively discussion. Historian and author Rima Lunin Schultz and Ann Durkin Keating, the Dr. C. Frederick Toenniges Professor of History at North Central College, present “Jane Addams, Social Planning, and Early Public Housing on Chicago’s Near West Side.”

Beginning in 1889, Jane Addams fashioned Hull-House as an experiment in social planning to improve not just the Near West Side but working-class neighborhoods across the nation. On a federal level, social planners in the 1930s took up the massive task of improving housing and infrastructure in working-class neighborhoods in PWA demonstration projects like the Jane Addams Homes opened deliberately just west of Hull-House in 1938.

The Zoom session will open at 6:45 p.m. with the program starting at 7:00 p.m. and concluding by 8:15 p.m. RSVP is required.  

This session is free of charge; we would greatly appreciate a donation to the Museum in any amount. A Zoom link will be provided after registration.  

The Urban History Seminars have been generously underwritten by the Chicago History Museum since 1983.