Author! Author! is a list of publications that credit the collection or staff of the Museum. Whether a work is distributed by a famous publishing house or self-published, fiction or history, DVD or book, we have included it on our list. Some of the publications result from a formal collaboration with the Museum; others are the result of individual research using our resources. Our name may come up in the photo credits, or perhaps you will find it in the acknowledgments. Whatever the case, we want to know more and share more about our impact.

Once a month, President Gary Johnson or Chief Historian Russell Lewis comment on a publication that provides a window into our collections. Authors and publishers who have used and credited our research resources and wish to be included in this list should send an e-mail to rightsrepro@chicagohistory.org.

> Browse the 2006 and 2005 list of Author! Author! publications

Commentary on 2006 and 2005 Publications

Borzo, Greg, Suzanne Haynes and Bernard Turner. The Windies' City. Chicago: Highlights of Chicago Press (2006).

President's Commentary, December 2006: This is one of our own, a lively look at Chicago’s hidden historical treasures by the people who know where to look – the Chicago History Museum’s volunteers. Each of the 26 sites includes: a description, why I recommend visiting this site, highlights of the visit and three things I learned. Because it is written by three individual volunteers, the ideas are very personal. Follow the tour ideas in this book, and you will feel that one of our guides is at your side.

Bruce, Susannah Ural. The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865. New York: New York University Press (2006).

President's Commentary, November 2006: This book is an example of how our collection at the Chicago History Museum can help to illuminate a national story. The Irish and the Civil War risks over-simplification when New York City’s draft riots are viewed as the defining experience. That only was one of many, in a community that saw 150,000 of its own fight for the Union. The author brings to life the issues of religious, ethnic and national identity through the reading of letters and other personal accounts. Chicago and Illinois play a vital part in the story, before, during and after the Civil War. While the author says that Irish immigrants experienced more tolerance in the Midwest than in the East, everything was relative. Abolitionist hero, Elijah Lovejoy departed St. Louis for Illinois in 1836, blaming not slaveholders, but the “foreign despotic influence of the Jesuits.” The Irish community would not soon forget the support of the Republican Chicago Tribune for the Know-Nothing candidate for mayor in 1855, support that was expressed in vituperative anti-Irish terms. Nevertheless, when war broke out, a Chicago Irish-American, James A. Mulligan, organized the 23rd Illinois, known as the “Irish Brigade.” Its achievements sometimes were mixed, the author explains, because toward the end of the war, it attracted new and very poor immigrants whose motivation for enlistment was more financial than ideological. This book will appeal not only to the Civil War buffs among us, but to students of immigration and community identity.

Smith, Carl. The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (2006).

President's Commentary, October 2006: If you think you know the man, and you think you know the plan, what will startle you about this account is the extent to which its proponents needed to engage the broader community to achieve implementation. "The Plan itself was forward-looking, but in some respects the publicity techniques the planners used to generate support, especially after its release, were even more innovative and modern." How could it be otherwise, when between 1912 and 1913, Chicago voters approved some 86 plan-related bond issues? The Plan was reshaped into easy-to-digest versions. Eighth-graders were targeted to be impressionable bearers of the Plan's ideals. Is the contrast between the business elite that supported the Plan and the average Chicagoan a false dichotomy? Not entirely. When it came to improving the lives of working families, the proponents of the city beautiful and the advocates of the eight-hour work day were talking past each other. Nevertheless, when you hear the Plan invoked in debates such as what to do with Meigs Field, remember that the continuing power of the Plan owes much to the successful efforts to promote the idea outside of the business circles. The well-timed appearance of this book will shape our understanding of Burnham's Plan of Chicago as we head into its centenary in 2009.

Marsh, Robert C., with Norman Pellegrini. 150 Years of Opera in Chicago. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press (2006).

President's Commentary, September 2006: Readers of Robert C. Marsh -- for 35 years music critic of the Chicago Sun-Times -- will see this as a capstone to a marvelous career, but it is more than that. This is an original work, not a collection of critical pieces. It combines scholarship and judgment, not only on the artistry of opera in Chicago over 150 years, but also on the business of the arts: "both filled boxes and a packed gallery are essential for a firm base of operations." For those who agree with Marsh that "an opera house is a constant invitation to personal growth and discovery," the book will offer fresh insights. The listing of all the operas offered at Chicago's major opera companies from 1850 - 2005, both by composer and by year, is an important new reference tool.

Crimmins, Jerry. Fort Dearborn. Evanston: Northwestern University Press (2006).

President's Commentary, August 2006: The author portrays a very complex world, part French, part British, part American, part Native American. He shows how even this remote outpost and the surrounding communities were roiled by larger forces affecting the region and the nation. This is a captivating story, and even the experts on the early history of Chicago will find fresh insights.

Blakely, Robert J. with Marcus Shepard. Earl B. Dickerson: A Voice for Freedom and Equality. Evanston: Northwestern University Press (2006).

President's Commentary, July 2006: If you want to deepen your understanding of the forces that transformed Chicago during the twentieth century, begin with this excellent biography. Longevity is one reason: Dickerson's life spanned 1891 to 1986. He first arrived in Chicago from Mississippi in 1907 — nine years before historians date the beginning of the Great Migration. His list of affiliations is another: board member of the national NAACP, President of the Chicago Urban League almost continuously from 1939-1955, and member of President Franklin Roosevelt's first Fair Employment Practices Commission, among many other posts. All of these are notable, but what makes Dickerson's life so illuminating is that he was a moving force in so many different sectors. Yes, lawyers are often aldermen, and lawyers sometimes are businessmen, but how many insurance company executives have been civil rights activists? Dickerson was all of these, and he also handled a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court: Hansberry v. Lee. This 1940 decision ended racially restrictive covenants on Chicago's South Side.

Ascoli, Peter M. Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2006).

President's Commentary, June 2006: How provocative Rosenwald's ideas still are. He seems to have invented modern philanthropy. His emphasis on challenge grants and his focus on social impact remind me very much of today's Young Turks among philanthropic families who oftern turn to causes that will have social impact and turn away from traditional charities and familiar approaches to endowment. Meticulously researched and well written, the book's judgments about personalities are well-grounded and its handling of complex topics masterful.

Carwardine, Richard. Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (2006).

President's Commentary, May 2006: There never will be an end to important new books about Lincoln. This is one of the best of the new books because of its fresh insights. For example, Carwardine examines how a man who paid a political price for not being a church member nevertheless was shaped by the Calvinist doctrines of his childhood and by the prevailing religious attitudes of his time. He may not have believed in the Trinity, but he believed in Providence and his religious outlook and language evolved over time, just as his views on slavery and other important matters also evolved. The book also includes the clearest charting I have ever seen of the very confusing sea changes in political parties and coalitions. Carwardine mines interactions with the many individuals and delegations that called on him at the White House to record the information that Lincoln must have received on a daily basis and also to underline the importance of these interactions to Lincoln as a consummate communicator. Such meetings generally are dismissed by historians as a nuisance and a distraction from more important matters, but it should not surprise us that the many hours that Lincoln chose to spend in this way are quite revealing to a patient and thorough historian.

Wasik, John F. The Merchant of Power: Sam Insull, Thomas Edison, and the Creation of the Modern Metropolis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2006).

President's Commentary, April 2006: This book will help the reader to make sense of the city we live in because we are still living in the world that Insull helped to create. I am not speaking only of the electrical generators and the infrastructure, such as the South Shore Railroad, but also the world of finance and the world of consumerism. We also live in a city full of reactions against Insull's world. In the utility reformers of his day — including economist and later Senator, Paul Douglas — we can see a straight line to reform groups such as the Citizens Utilities Board. When his empire collapsed and Insull was brought to trial in Chicago amid death threats, you can see a haunting resemblance to the trial of the top Enron executives. (Insull was found not guilty on all charges, by the way.) My only quarrel is that the subject and his world are too large for a short book. There is so much to tell that every account leaves the reader wanting even more.

Waldheim, Charles and Katerina Ruedi Ray, eds. Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

President's Commentary, March 2006: The seminal article in this collection is Robert Bruegmann's "Myth of the Chicago School." It takes up the editors' challenge to offer alternatives to the story line we all know so well of the Chicago school of architecture, particularly with his analysis of Holabird & Roche's Marquette Building. The building's on-going renovation underlines his point by revealing more and more of the ornamental and classically-inspired features that have been glossed over in telling the familiar story of form and function in Chicago. David Van Zanten tells of "The Centrality of the Columbian Exposition in the History of Chicago Architecture" — a heretical title to the storytellers of "progressive functionalism." Robert A. Sobieszek gives the architectural photography of Hedrich-Blessing its due, with its "consummate photographic artistry, verve, and authority." Its photographs of the Century of Progress reveal "the visual exuberance, the flare for the operatic, and the essential spirit of futurism that is shared by both image and building." Thank goodness that Hedrich-Blessing continues to capture our city's new architecture, with its "consummate photographic artistry, verve, and authority"! Who would have guessed that my father's boyhood church, St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Park Ridge, was the largest commission for Elisabeth A. Martini, at the time the only woman architect licensed in private practice in Illinois? Martini ran an advertisement in 1921: "Only girl architect lonely. Wanted — to meet all the women architects in Chicago to form a club." Susan F. King focuses on Martini as "emblematic of the cyclical pattern of women in America of alternating progress and backlash."

Venet, Mary Hamand. A Strong-Minded Woman, The Life of Mary Livermore. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press (2005).

President's Commentary, February 2006: Venet's portrayal of an activist who was just below the top bracket in the women's sufferage movement offers many insights into women's studies, as well as Chicago and national themes. Married to a Universalist minister, she arrived in Chicago in 1857. She and her husband edited New Covenant, a newspaper devoted to social activism, and later Agitator, dedicated to women's rights. She was conspicuous as the only woman on the floor and the only female journalist at the press tables at the 1860 convention in Chicago's Wigwam that nominated Lincoln for President. She broke the taboo that women could not give a public address. Her work in Chicago during the Civil War is particularly revealing, demonstrating how wartime transformed the lives of strait-laced women into lives of activism that quickly found a focus in the post-war women's sufferage movement and also in many other reform causes. She met with President Lincoln and persuaded him to donate the original Emancipation Proclamation to be auctioned at a grand fair of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission, held in 1863 to raise funds for medical relief for the troops. The highest bidder donated it to the Chicago Historical Society, but, alas, it was destroyed during the Great Chicago Fire.

Joseph, Frank S. To Love Mercy. Huntington, WV: Mid-Atlantic Highlands (2006).

President's Commentary, January 2006: What happens when urban worlds collide? In Tom Wolfe's The Bonfires of the Vanities, what emerged was a grotesque entertainment set in New York. To Love Mercy is something very different: a portrait of scences of 1940s Chicago — from Riverview Park to the South Side — with a focus on two boys: one from Bronzeville and one from Hyde Park. The voices are authentic and the details are carefully researched, though the story line is a kind of fantasy. Chicagoans who remember the forties, fifties or sixties will recognize their city. They will relish some of the memories, but others will make them uncomfortable. The book relies heavily on the Douglas/Grand Boulevard Community oral history project, available at the Chicago History Museum.

Bingham, Dennis with Russell A. Schultz. A Proud Tradition: A Pictorial History of the Chicago Police Department. Chicago: An Official Publication of the Chicago Police Department. (2005).

President's Commentary, December 2005: The photos bring the history to life, but this is not simply a picture book. The text is well-written and well documented. The department was created officially in 1835; before then, the garrison of Fort Dearborn offered some protection to the citizens, along with a town crier and occasional visits by a county constable. The book does not shy away from some controversial subjects, such as the Haymarket Riot. The photos remain the heart of the book and reveal important aspects of Chicago's social history. The photo of the suspect standing on one leg while his foot is being measured according to the exacting standards of the French criminologist, Alphonse Bertillion, is one of this book's many priceless shots.