Museum Blog

CHM curatorial intern Brigid Kennedy recounts the extraordinary life of Mary Livermore. This blog post is the first of a series in which we share the stories of local women who made history in anticipation of an exhibition about Chicago women and the vote. Mary Livermore dedicated her life to abolition, temperance, women’s suffrage, and More

CHM collections intern Araceli Medina recaps her work this past summer assisting with the ongoing inventory of the Decorative and Industrial Arts collection. Through the inventory process, Medina saw first-hand how objects can tell stories that help us understand the past as it was lived. The process of inventorying a museum collection is important and More

This past summer, CHM collections intern Elise O’Neil assisted with the ongoing inventory of the Decorative and Industrial Arts collection. In this blog post, O’Neil writes about the legacies that objects reflect, depending on who owned them. As a lifelong history nerd, working at the Chicago History Museum as a collections intern this summer and doing More

In this blog post, CHM curatorial intern Brigid Kennedy recounts the life of labor organizer Lucy Parsons. The details of Lucy Parsons’s early life in Texas are murky, and she herself provided different accounts of her youth and heritage. Her race was the subject of public debate, but she claimed only Mexican and Muscogee Creek More

In part two of this series, project cataloger Emma Florio explains more about the process of cataloging collections from scratch and the detective work it requires. Learn more about this retroconversion project, which was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. While digitizing the catalog cards for the Chicago History Museum’s small manuscript More