The United States has been, historically, a land of trees. This made its built environment thoroughgoingly wooden and, consequently, alarmingly combustible. In the same way that fossil fuels are today the source of our abundance but also the cause of increasingly destructive climate disasters, wood was the source of US abundance and the cause of constant, harrowing fires.

The Guild of the Chicago History Museum invites you to brunch and a lecture by Daniel Immerwahr, author and Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, on how those hair-raising fires have shaped—or scarred—the American past.

Tickets on sale soon!