Museum Blog

With a lifelong interest in music, no Mainbocher exhibition would be complete without a sampling of the songs that inspired and touched the designer. Many of his clients were performers and composers, and Mainbocher is credited with creating costumes for a total of eighteen Broadway plays, concerts, or musicals from 1941 to 1964. The Making More

Get to know Raymond Hudd and the contents of his photographs and papers in this blog post by collections intern Analú M. López, a practicum student in archives this spring. The Chicago-based milliner Raymond Hudd (1924–2011) was well known for his bold, whimsical hat designs and was often referred to as the “Mad Hatter of More

Collections volunteer Robert Blythe details the history and contents of the Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Illinois records in our Research Center. During the Civil War, some 2.7 million men served in Union blue from 1861 to 1865. To preserve their bonds of comradeship and ensure that veterans and their families received sufficient More

Collections volunteer Robert Blythe details the history and contents of the Illinois Women’s Agenda records in our Research Center. The records of the Illinois Women’s Agenda (IWA) shed light on the many and varied activities that characterized second-wave feminism in America in the 1970s and 1980s. Established in December 1975, the IWA was a coalition More

Collections volunteer Robert Blythe details the history and contents of the African American Police League records in our Research Center. “Black Police League Has Tough Job Ahead.” This headline could have been from yesterday’s newspaper, but in fact appeared in the Chicago Defender in September 1968. In May of that year, Chicago Police Department (CPD) More