Museum Blog

DePaul University students Joseph Flynn, Jay Kietzman, Jessica Licklider, and Lily Zenger delve into the issues surrounding the Civil War monuments in the Chicago area. They were students of Peter T. Alter, the Museum’s historian and director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History, as part of DePaul University’s public history program. Former CHM More

For the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, CHM assistant editor Esther D. Wang recaps the events leading up to that moment, highlighting the youngest and only female member of the team. On December 2, 1942, a team of scientists at the University of Chicago silently sipped Chianti from paper cups More

CHM digital content manager Julius L. Jones writes about Chicago ØØ: A Century of Progress, a forthcoming virtual reality app on the 1933–34 world’s fair and the third installment in the Chicago ØØ series. Chicago ØØ is an ongoing venture to create new media experiences with CHM’s extensive photograph, film, and audio archive and to tell the More

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the White Sox winning the 1917 World Series, CHM historian Peter T. Alter looks back at the team and its activities within the context of that year. Saturday, October 6, 1917, dawned chilly and wet in Chicago. A thirteen-year-old White Sox fan, James T. Farrell, left his More

CHM senior curator Olivia Mahoney writes about a Chicago innovation that helped the city recover from the 1871 fire in a surprisingly beautiful way. This year marks the 146th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire that blazed through the city from October 8 to 10, 1871. One of the worst urban fires in American history More