On this day in 2011, the Germania Club Building in the city’s Old Town neighborhood was designated a Chicago Landmark. The history of this neighborhood club can be traced back to the Germania Männerchor, a men’s chorus comprising German American Civil War veterans who sang at President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral ceremonies in Chicago in 1865. More
On this day in 1882, Walter T. Bailey was born in Kewanee, Illinois, to Emanuel and Lucy Bailey. He was the first African American to graduate with a BS in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the first licensed African American architect in the state of Illinois, and the first licensed African More
On this day in 1908, French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris. She was a prolific and sometimes controversial writer who is perhaps best known for her seminal feminist text, The Second Sex (1949). While she was based mostly in Paris, Beauvoir traveled extensively and also spent time in Chicago. During More
On December 29, 1958, Reverend Joseph Harrison Jackson received his official Certificate of Life Time Call as Olivet Baptist Church’s head pastor. Jackson was a renowned African American pastor and civil rights leader in the twentieth century, who left his mark through activism focused on education, housing, and both economic and political equality for Black More
In the late nineteenth century, Chicago became a center for commercial printing in the United States, second only to New York. Chicago printers worked closely with magazine and catalog publishers; they had easy access to rail transportation; and they achieved a competitive position because Chicago was the point at which zoned shipping rates for bulky More