Museum Blog

As a young girl, Rev. Christine V. Hides loved to read and dreamed of solving mysteries. Now Hides has helped the Chicago History Museum solve one. After visiting the Vivian Maier: In Color exhibition, she identified the location where Vivian Maier took a photograph after recognizing two stained glass windows in an image. Rev. Christine More

This blog post has been adapted from an essay by CHM intern Megha Khemka, based on her work in the summer of 2022 focused on Chicago’s history with immigration. Whatever your current picture of undocumented individuals, it’s probably incomplete. I know mine was. Immigration was a topic I thought I knew well; my parents were More

This summer, Lily Mayfield assisted CHM technical services librarian Elizabeth McKinley in the Abakanowicz Research Center. Mayfield writes about her experience discovering the full names of women featured in the Museum’s carte de visite collection. How can one study the past without knowing the names of those who came before? That is the question posed More

In this blog post, CHM intern Kirsten Lopez shares what she learned while preparing to interview a retired Afro-American Patrolmen’s League member as part of an ongoing CHM oral history project. During my summer 2021 internship, I had the opportunity to work on CHM’s ongoing Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL) Oral History Project, which is focused More

In this blog post, CHM intern Rebekah Otto reflects on her experience working on CHM’s ongoing Afro-American Patrolmen’s League Oral History Project. AAPL vinyl banner that reads, 1961–68. CHM, ICHi-170336 When I accepted the Black Metropolis Research Consortium’s Archie Motley Archival Internship offer, I had a vague understanding of my project. I was thrilled to More