Great Chicago Research Articles

The Chicago Reform School Band: 1862-1872

The purpose of this study was to document the history of the band founded at the Chicago Reform School (CRS) circa 1862. Research questions focused on the ensemble's (1) origin and time frame, (2) service to the school and community, (3) instructors, (4) instrumentation, (5) performances, (6) funding, and (7) influence on other school bands. The Chicago Reform School was established in 1855 to provide a home and education for juvenile offenders. In addition to their academic study and vocational training, several students participated in a band that was organized around 1862 and modeled after military bands of the time. By 1866, this ensemble consisted of a fife and drum corps and a brass band that were funded by performances given throughout the city. Alfred D. Langan was the first known director, followed by Thomas P. Westendorf and Hugh Goodwin. Instrumental music continued at the CRS until around 1872, when the institution was closed due to legal issues and the partial destruction of its facilities by the Great Chicago Fire.

The Great San Francisco Earthquake: One of America's Worst Urban Disasters (review)

THE GREAT SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE: ONE OF AMERICA'S WORST URBAN DISASTERS (2005) American Experience, WGBH The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 ranks with Hurricane Katrina's effect on the city of New Orleans in 2005 and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 as one of the worst disasters to befall an American city. This fifty-six minute documentary, produced for WGBH and American Experience, tells the story of the earthquake using still photographs drawn from archives and some rare cinematic footage of San Francisco at this time. The documentary, narrated by Academy Award winning actor, F. Murray Abraham, opens with an explanation of San Francisco's turn-of-the-century charm. The city dazzled visitors, including Rudyard Kipling and President Theodore Roosevelt, as a city of alluring entertainment and as a symbol of the booming Roosevelt referred to it as the of the West. The film shows a clip of Roosevelt's visit to the city, complete with one of his signature boisterous speeches. As the ninth biggest city in the United States, and the biggest city of the West in 1906, San Francisco had a lot to offer visitors and newcomers, and no one felt it was poised for disaster. Immigrants and migrants streamed in; San Francisco was comprised of onethird immigrants and one-third children of immigrants at the time of the quake. Of particular interest were the neighborhoods known as South of Market-made mostly of wood buildings, this immigrant neighborhood was first to burn in the fires following the earthquake-and North of Market, the five block square neighborhood offering a home to the city's 20,000 Chinese. The earthquake hit the city at 5:12 AM on April 18, 1906. Two hundred miles of the San Andreas Fault rumbled, making eight thousand homeless in San Jose and leveling the city of Santa Rosa. But San Francisco felt the earthquake most keenly. The greatest devastation stemmed from the fires that followed the quake. Gas mains ruptured and chimneys collapsed. Fifty fires broke out around the city. A blaze known as the ham and eggs fire began when one family prepared their breakfast relying on a damaged chimney. Twenty-eight thousand buildings were destroyed in the earthquake and resulting fires; San Franciscans filed $170,000,000 in insurance claims. Two hundred thousand people, rendered homeless, took refuge in the city parks. Estimates on death counts vary, yet most likely number in the thousands. Efforts to stop the looting that followed the quake, as well as attempts to quench the fire, often failed. …

City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919 by Margaret Garb

146 Michigan Historical Review Margaret Garb. City of American Dreams: A History ofHome Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 256. Bibliography. IUustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth, $40.00. From the rude log cabin of frontier lore to the brick bungalow in ethnic neighborhoods of industrial cities to the ranch house of post World-War-II suburbia, the image of the American way of life has been etched into a series of single-family houses: front yards, porches, later a car parked in the driveway, and the wife and kids greeting dad, head of the household and property owner. This national obsession with the single-family home has had many unintended effects, and in City ofAmerican Dreams Margaret Garb focuses on one American city in an attempt to separate reality from the fictions we believe about home ownership. One major conclusion she reaches is that home ownership passed increasingly beyond the financial means of low-waged and unskilled workers. In addition, valorizing home ownership as the quintessential American way of life hindered our ability to solve housing problems for those who were shut out of private housing markets. Garb traces the history of housing in Chicago from 1871 to 1919in the context of "two distinct and rich strands of urban history: studies that have demonstrated significant rates of home-ownership among the post-Civ? War immigrant working classes and those that have tracked the gradual expansion of middle-class suburbs in the late nineteenth century" (pp. 4-5). She has good grounds for considering Chicago a "generaUy representative city"(p. 9), since patterns of industrialization, immigration, class conflict, and struggles over property rights, as weU as labor and reform movements in this midwestern city not only reflected what was going on elsewhere in the United States but also were influenced by national developments. Garb begins by reviewing a weU-researched aspect of Chicago history: the public conflict over the banning of wood-frame construction within the city limits after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She describes how Chicago's German, Irish, and Scandinavian workers "looked to home ownership to secure their economic and political status in the new urban world" (p. 17). In the book's strongest chapter, "Staking a Claim in the Industrializing City," Garb describes the variety of ways inwhich "Chicago's laborers used residential property to stake a claim in their new homeland and to strengthen their economic position Book Reviews 147 in relation to employers and a generaUy inadequate labor market" (p. 37). Garb's use of land-tide records gives us a deta?ed understanding of the strategies employed in "local capital markets" (p. 56). She describes how workers provided themselves with a cash flow beyond the limited low wages of factory work before the emergence of a citywide real-estate market. Working-class families used various strategies to make up for the lack of an adequate household income. Wives took in washing, did piecework, and took in boarders. Ch?dren left school to bring in additional pennies aweek. Such sacrifices led middle-class reformers to question working-class parents' ambition to own their own homes and to discourage the very strategies of ch?d labor, piecework, and boarding workers used in their quest to own property. IronicaUy, Garb argues that the pursuit of home ownership at almost any cost came into conflict with the new standards of living that reformers advocated during the Progressive Era. She provides a valuable account of how municipal public health expanded and intersected with the market for multifamily and single-family homes. She reveals the complicated and unexpected outcomes of reformers' efforts to promote good sanitation as weU as the way in which homebuilders and land speculators linked respectability and health. These two trends produced a "remarkable shift in the ways residential property was valued" (p. 126). One of the outcomes was the distinction between respectable and unworthy homes; businessmen builders like S. E. Gross established a "class-segregated housing market and a pattern of mobility that would characterize Chicago and its suburban real estate markets through much of the twentieth century" (p. 147). UnskiUed wage workers found home ownership...

Before the Flood: What Policymakers Can Learn from the Great Chicago Heat Wave

Before the Flood: What Policymakers Can Learn from the Great Chicago Heat Wave Get access Eric Klinenberg Eric Klinenberg Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Policy & Aging Report, Volume 16, Issue 2, Spring 2006, Pages 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/16.2.1a Published: 01 March 2006

Veneklasen Brick: A Family, a Company, and a Unique Nineteenth-Century Architectural Movement in Michigan by Michael J. Douma

134 Michigan Historical Review provided a framework for action. Just as Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, marked the beginning of a wave of reform directed at toxic chemical pollutants, theWater Quality Agreement marked the beginning of a twenty-year period of broad-based comebacks for the Great Lakes. Dempsey deals skillfully with that era, citing its goals, successes, and failures. Yet despite some progress, he concludes that the lakes are in peril. A litany of failures and the reasons why these failures occurred are cited in rich detail, and the evidence of current serious trouble is spelled out clearly. Dempsey believes that government programs need large scale funding and that the people who live around the lakes must raise their voices and exercise their power as citizens to achieve reform. On the Brink covers several centuries in only 276 pages of text, and these pages are embellished with reminiscences about life on the lakes and colorful episodes in their history. Most of the work focuses on the last half-century, and therein lies the book's major contribution: it provides a critical review of efforts to control pollution. Also important is Dempsey's broad interpretive view of how lake quality has deteriorated during the past two centuries. Wisely, he considers the lakes as a geographic unit, drawing on the history of both Canadians and Americans, and while incomplete and occasionally incorrect, the general portrait is accurate. On the Brink is a wake-up call that draws upon the work of many other scholars. The author has served as an environmental advisor in Michigan government and as a member of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. Margaret Beattie Bogue Em?rita Professor of History and Liberal Studies University ofWisconsin, Madison Michael J. Douma. Veneklasen Brick: A Family, a Company, and a Unique Nineteenth-Century Architectural Movement inMichigan. Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005. Pp. 117. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Paper, $16.00. How do we learn to "read" the historic landscape/townscape? Michael Douma's study of brickworks and brick building in West Michigan is an important reconstruction of the collective memory of a particular part of America. Indeed, anyone coming upon an antique West Michigan brick structure?sometimes deep orange, sometimes with red and white detailing?should remember the artistic and entrepreneurial genius of the Veneklasen family. Book Reviews 135 Most early industries along Lake Michigan's eastern shore were connected to the extraction of raw materials from the great white pine forests or from the lake. These products included not only cut lumber and shingles by the millions of board feet, but also hemlock for leather tanning and hardwood for boatbuilding?and, of course, the yield of the lake itself, the great Lake Michigan whitefish. Most of these products were sent across the lake to Chicago and Milwaukee, often to be exported farther west. All of this, of course, was a part of that great Chicago economy that William Cronin called "nature's metropolis" in his book Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which was published in 1991. Douma's book looks at another side ofthat story: the extraction of natural resources for local consumption. This is the story of the rich clay fields that lay between the Dutch setdements of Groningen and Zeeland in West Michigan's Ottawa County. It centers on how the Veneklasen family organized and carried on a notable industry. It is about the invention of a building type?the solid and respectable brick house?for an emigrant community as well as the story of the craft of brick making and an account of the growth and decline of an important labor force. Veneklasen Brick considers the early organization of the brick industry and the various reasons for the demand for bricks (class identification as well as fire protection), brick building as a construction form, labor conditions, and the architecture ofWest Michigan brick building. It was in 1851 that the Veneklasen family turned out the bricks for the area's first brick house?the Steketee/Scholten house, which still stands very near where the first Veneklasen brickyard was located in Holland Township. From this point onward in the Holland-Zeeland area brick houses became common...

My Kind of Town

My Kind of Town

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller (eds.), An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home FrontDavid Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern HistoryJames McPherson, Antietam: The Battle that Changed the Course of the Civil WarMark Meister and Phyllis M. Japp (eds.), Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular CultureAvrom Fleishman, New Class Culture: How an Emergent Class Is Transforming America's CultureRichard E. Bales, The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary's CowW. H. New (ed.), Encyclopedia of Literature In CanadaArchie Green, Tin MenDavid M. Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American WestWilliam H. Young and Nancy K. Young, American Popular Culture Through History: The 1930sDonald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (eds.), The Futures of American StudiesW. J. Rorabaugh, Kennedy and The Promise of the SixtiesRobert Cohen (ed.), Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: The Letters From Children of the Great DepressionSally G. McMillen, To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865‐1915James A. Von Schilling, The Magic Window: American Television, 1939‐1953Albert Borowitz, Blood & Ink: An International Guide To Fact‐Based Crime LiteratureDeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War

"Domestic and Respectable": Suburbanization and Social Control After the Great Chicago Fire

"Domestic and Respectable": Suburbanization and Social Control After the Great Chicago Fire

The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory

The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory

“The Strong Arm of the Military Power of the United States”: The Chicago Fire, the Constitution, and Reconstruction

There must be some limit to the authority of the Army or there will be no security to civil rights, proclaimed a letter to the governor in November 1871. The state legislature agreed, passing a resolution we declare unlawful, and an infraction of the constitution of this State and of the United States, the late occupation. The letter and resolution, surprisingly, did not refer to President Ulysses S. Grant's use of nine companies of United States troops in South Carolina to quell the Ku Klux Klan in October 1871. This outrage against military usurpation actually did not occur in the South at all, but in Illinois. During the great Chicago fire of October 1871, Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan dispatched troops to help, eventually declaring martial law to maintain order in the city. Sheridan, though, did not consult the state authorities and according to Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, the United States could protect a state against domestic violence only on application of the Legislature, or of the Executive, of that state. The Republican governor of Illinois, John M. Palmer, petitioned the state legislature to condemn Sheridan, Maj. General William Tecumseh Sherman, and President Grant for establishing rule. Under the constitution, the governor insisted, it is left to the State authorities to determine the necessity for Federal aid, and no officer of the army, under any circumstances, is at liberty without their consent, to interfere in their internal affairs. Palmer declared the Federal government's use of force after the Chicago fire subversive of the principles of free government.

Of Weddings and Baseball

Weddings can make you think in unusual ways. Last month this father of the bride was flooded with a variety of emotions as he and his wife walked their firstborn down the aisle. Memories flew past at supersonic speeds, and there was a sharpening of the senses that made every second more intense and memorable. And right in the middle of all those images and emotions were thoughts of Minnie Minoso and Ernie Banks. Even in spirit these great Chicago baseball legends had no business being at my daughter's wedding, but nonetheless there they were, and they just would not leave. Minnie Minoso, a Cuban immigrant who began playing baseball on sugar plantations, became fodder for parody and derision when he said, “Baseball has been very, very good to me.” Minoso's heartfelt remarks—both the content and the accent—have been mocked time and again.…

Bernhardus (= Pagurus) Armatus Dana, 1851 (Decapoda, Anomura): Replacement of the Neotype By a Rediscovered Syntype

In 1851 and 1852, James Dana described a large number of new crustaceans collected by the United States Exploring Expedition. One of these was Bern hardus armatus, a new species of northern Pacific hermit crab. Many of Dana's type specimens, including the type specimen(s) of B. armatus, were thought lost the great Chicago fire of 1871 (see Evans, 1967), but we here report the dis covery of a syntypic specimen the collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). Dana introduced Bernhardus (now Pagurus) armatus (type locality: in freto Tuget' Oregonensi [= Puget Sound, Washington]) a brief latinized descrip tion (1851: 270), and later gave an expanded English description (1852: 442). No illustration of the species appeared until the publication of Dana's Atlas of Crustacea (1855, pi. 27 fig. 2a) and Dana never designated a holotype nor cited an exact number of specimens his type series. Stimpson (1858: 248) syn onymized the species with Eupagurus (now Pagurus) ochotensis (Brandt, 1851), but both Makarov (1938: 202) and McLaughlin (1974: 48) recognized the two species as distinct (see McLaughlin, 1974, for a more complete nomenclatural history). McLaughlin (1974: 57), citing the prior difficulties of separating P. ar matus and P. ochotensis and believing the type(s) to have been lost or destroyed, designated a male specimen (United States National Museum [USNM] 143637 from off Fauntleroy Fry Dock, Puget Sound, Washington) as the neotype for Bernhardus armatus.

Interfacing American culture: the perils and potentials of virtual exhibitions

The Great Chicago Fire and The Web of Memory, located at , fall 1996-present.. Chicago Historical Society and Academic Technologies Northwestern University, exhibition designers. Sponsored in part by H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine. Carl Smith, curator and author; Paul Hertz, art director; Joe Germuska, production supervisor; Eric Whitley, Lou Skriba, and Gia Sadhwani, assistance.

The New Deal's black congressman: a life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell

In this fascinating biography, Dennis S. Nordin chronicles the life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell, the first black Democrat to be elected to Congress. Although he is now one of history's forgotten figures, Mitchell was once almost as well known among black college students as Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. Nordin, however, shows that Mitchell's achievements and thus his fame were the direct result of his questionable deeds. Mitchell found himself owing his political success and thus his loyalty to the Chicago Machine. Because he was under strict orders from Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly not to cause problems or be confrontational, Mitchell favored the Machine's interests over those of his constituents. It was only in the later years of his political career that Mitchell began to show opposition to his Machine backing. He had been an opponent of the NAACP in his first years in Congress, but later became a strong supporter of an NAACP antilynching bill. In 1937, Mitchell sued three railroad companies for not offering equal treatment and accommodations for all passengers. The case went to the Supreme Court, which gave Mitchell a favorable ruling. As a result of these confrontational acts, the Chicago Machine quickly decided to endorse Mitchell in the elections of 1942. In his research, Nordin relies on such primary sources as manuscripts, newspapers, and court records, as well as information from interviews with Mitchell's friends, neighbors, colleagues, political rivals, and widow. Woven tightly together, these sources form a narrative that reveals a most complex and intriguing individual, a man whose political and moral views and acts were strongly linked to the goals of the great Chicago politicalMachine.

Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874.

The fateful kick of Mrs O'Leary's cow, the flight to escape the flames, the rapid rebuilding - these are the well-known stories of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. But as much as Chicago's recovery from disaster was a remarkable civic achievement, the Great Fire is also the story of a city's people divided and at odds. In a detailed account, drawn on memoirs, private correspondences and other documents, this book chronicles years of widespread - and sometimes bitter - social and political conflict in the fire's wake, from fights over relief soup kitchens and cries against profiteering to marches on city hall by workers burned out of their homes. The author shows how, through the years of rebuilding, the people of Chicago struggled to define civic order and the role that good citizens would play within it. As they rebuilt, Sawislak writes, Chicagoans confronted hard questions about charity and social welfare, work and labour relations, morality, and the limits of state power. Their debates in turn exposed the array of values and interests that different class, ethnic, and religious groups brought to these public discussions.

Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and The Model Town of Pullman

Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and The Model Town of Pullman

Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket bombing of 1886 and the making and unmaking of the model town of Pullman - these events in what many considered the quintessential American city forced people across the country to confront the disorder that seemed inevitably to accompany urban growth and social change. In this book, Carl Smith explores the imaginative dimensions of these events as he traces the evolution of beliefs that increasingly linked city, disorder and social reality in the minds of Americans.

The Meanings of the Modern City: Chicago After the Linguistic Turn

In early 1867 writer James Parton visited Chicago in order to gather materials for an Atlantic Monthly article on city, part of a series he planned on urban West. Writing exuberantly to his editor, Parton advised him: when next you are tired, go to those western cities, and get below surface of them. As man of business, as literary man, as American citizen, and as human being, you will be instructed and pleased. The United States is there.1 In Parton's view, dynamism and energy of Chicago were producing a new urban spirit far different from that of East: the too respectable Bostonian, staid Philadelphian, acquire, after living awhile in Chicago, a vivacity of mind, an interest in things around them, a public spirit, which they did not possess at home.2 Parton was only one of numerous post-Civil War commentators and writers who participated in an extensive public discussion of meaning of Chicago within American life. Like Parton, some celebrated Chicago as a new and invigorating form of urban order: it was Queen of West, embodiment of frontier energy and expansive growth, a concrete realization of Manifest Destiny. Others, however, tended to stress that growth of Chicago brought disorder in its wake; their writings relied upon longstanding urban vocabularies associating cities with darkness, corruption, and decadence, yet also refigured city within an emerging discussion of perils of modernity and modernization. Carl Smith's richly textured and deeply researched urban and cultural history argues that public discussions of late-nineteenth-century Chicago tell us much about changing anxieties associated with modernity in American culture. To some extent his Urban Disorder and Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, Haymarket Bomb, and Model Town of Pullman continues project of Smith's 1984 Chicago and American Literary Imagination 18801920: both books are concerned with aesthetic and intellectual responses to

Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman.Carl Smith

<i>Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman.</i>Carl Smith

Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman.

Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman.