Editor's Note

Abstract

HAWTHORNE, SPEAKING THROUGH “COVERDALE,” describes a fictionalized failed utopian community in 1840s Massachusetts. History is filled by the wreckage of good ideas shattered on the shoals of human frailty, ego, and miscalculation. But as Hawthorne suggests, important things may be learned by examining lost hopes. Perhaps a dream is resurrected. “A Missed Opportunity in the Catholic War on Poverty: Chicago's Archdiocesan Inter-Parish Movement” by Kevin Ryan offers an analysis of a failed effort in the 1960s to bring together poor inner-city parishes and affluent city and suburban ones in a movement to learn from each other while fighting poverty and racism.But, Ryan notes, the effort came at one of the worst periods of racial tension in the city's history, as white ethnic neighborhoods sometimes reacted violently to the movement of Black citizens into their enclaves. The program's goal was to put teeth into the Catholic War on Poverty by allowing the poor and affluent parishes to work together on the challenges of income inequality and race. Sadly, these challenges remain, confounding our relations with one another.Daniel Garrison Brinton lived through a challenging time in Illinois a century before Chicago's racial crisis. As the surgeon in charge of the US Army General Hospital in Quincy, Brinton was relieved to escape the carnage of the Chancellorsville and Gettysburg battlefields but found much to keep him occupied supervising a five-building complex. Jonathan W. White and Michael Sparks have edited and annotated his letters home to Pennsylvania family. In his frank comments to relatives, Brinton recounts tensions in Quincy, a city and area he believed dominated by Democrats, various business ventures, efforts to get out the soldier vote in the 1864 election, and his use of the race card to break a strike by Irish washerwomen.Through strong scholarship and analysis, Wayne Duerkes takes us into an Ottawa general store as Illinois-Michigan Canal construction created an economic boom in the mid-1830s. “Conrad Seabaugh & Company: An Inside Look at an Illinois Hinterland Merchant” utilizes the day books kept by Seabaugh during the years he operated the business. Placing him in the context of his times’ business practices, Duerkes demonstrates not only the economic power of the canal project but the national economic conditions and Seabaugh's likely erratic business practices influencing the enterprise's success and failure. Merchants like Seabaugh, the author contends, played a prominent role in local economic development.Though touching two centuries of history, these articles share a common theme—challenge and response. As our state sails on into the twenty-first century, it is helpful, no, important, to never lose the lessons offered by the past.