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Changing the Way We Teach
Writing and Resistance in the Training of Teaching Assistants
Sally Barr Ebest
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Changing the Way We Teach: Writing and Resistance in the Training of Teaching Assistants draws on eighteen case studies to illustrate the critical role writing plays in overcoming graduate student resistance to instruction, facilitating change, and developing professional identity. Sally Barr Ebest argues that teaching assistants in English must be actively engaged in the theory and practice underlying composition pedagogy in order to better understand how to alter the way they teach and why such change is necessary.

In illustrating the potential for change when the paradigm shift in composition is applied to graduate education, Ebest considers recent discussions of composition pedagogy; post-secondary teaching theories; cognitive, social cognitive, and educational psychology; and issues of gender, voice, and writing.

Stemming from research conducted over a five-year period, this volume explores how a cross-section of teaching assistants responded to pedagogy as students and how their acceptance of pedagogy affected their performance as instructors. Investigating reasons behind manifestations of resistance and necessary elements for overcoming it, Ebest finds that engagement in composition strategies—reflective writing, journaling, drafting, and active learning—and restoration of feelings of self-efficacy are the primary factors that facilitate change.

Concerned with gender as it relates to personal construct, Changing the Way We Teach traces the influence of familial expectations and the effects of literacy experiences on students and draws correlations between feminist and composition pedagogy. Ebest asserts that the phenomena contributing to the development of a strong, unified voice in women—self-knowledge, empathy, positive role models, and mentors—should be essential elements of a constructivist graduate curriculum.

To understand composition pedagogy and to convince students of its values, Ebest holds that educators must embrace it themselves and trace the effects through active research. By providing graduate students with pedagogical sites for research and reflection, faculty enable them to express their anger or fear, study its sources, and quite often write their way to a new understanding.

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Changing Their Minds?
Donald Trump and Presidential Leadership
George C. Edwards III
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Despite popular perceptions, presidents rarely succeed in persuading either the public or members of Congress to change their minds and move from opposition to particular policies to support of them. As a result, the White House is not able to alter the political landscape and create opportunities for change. Instead, successful presidents recognize and skillfully exploit the opportunities already found in their political environments. If they fail to understand their strategic positions, they are likely to overreach and experience political disaster.
 
Donald Trump has been a distinctive president, and his arrival in the Oval Office brought new questions. Could someone with his decades of experience as a self-promoter connect with the public and win its support? Could a president who is an experienced negotiator obtain the support in Congress needed to pass his legislative programs? Would we need to adjust the theory of presidential leadership to accommodate a president with unique persuasive skills?
 
Building on decades of research and employing extensive new data, George C. Edwards III addresses these questions. He finds that President Trump has been no different than other presidents in being constrained by his environment. He moved neither the public nor Congress. Even for an experienced salesman and dealmaker, presidential power is still not the power to persuade. Equally important was the fact that, as Edwards shows, Trump was not able to exploit the opportunities he had. In fact, we learn here that the patterns of the president’s rhetoric and communications and his approach to dealing with Congress ultimately lessened his chances of success. President Trump, it turns out, was often his own agenda’s undoing.
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Changing Works
Visions of a Lost Agriculture
Douglas Harper
University of Chicago Press, 2001
The work of Douglas Harper has for two decades documented worlds in eclipse. A glimpse into the life of dairy farmers in upstate New York on the cusp of technological change, Changing Works is no exception. With photographs and interviews with farmers, Harper brings into view a social world altered by machines and stuns us with gorgeous visions of rural times past. As a member of this community, Harper relates compelling stories about families and their dairies that reveal how the advent of industrialized labor changed the way farmers structure their work and organize their lives. His new book charts the transformation of American farming from small dairies based on animal power and cooperative work to industrialized agriculture.

Changing Works combines Harper's pictures with classic images by photographers such as Gordon Parks, Sol Libsohn, and Charlotte Brooks-men and women whose work during the 1940s documented the mechanization and automation of agricultural practices. Part social history and part analysis of the drive to mass production, Changing Works examines how we farmed a half century ago versus how we do today through pictures new and old and through discussions with elderly farmers who witnessed the makeover. Ultimately, Harper challenges timely ecological and social questions about contemporary agriculture. He shows us how the dissolution of cooperative dairy farming has diminished the safety of the practice, degraded the way we relate to our natural environment, and splintered the once tight-knit communities of rural farmers. Mindful, then, of the advantages of preindustrial agriculture, and heeding the alarming spread of mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease, Changing Works harks back to the benefits of an older system.
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Channeling the Past
Politicizing History in Postwar America
Erik Christiansen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
After the turmoil of the Great Depression and World War II, Americans looked to the nation’s more distant past for lessons to inform its uncertain future. By applying recent and emerging techniques in mass communication—including radio and television programs and commercial book clubs—American elites working in media, commerce, and government used history to confer authority on their respective messages.
    With insight and wit, Erik Christiansen uncovers in Channeling the Past the ways that powerful corporations rewrote history to strengthen the postwar corporate state, while progressives, communists, and other leftists vied to make their own versions of the past more popular. Christiansen looks closely at several notable initiatives—CBS’s flashback You Are There program; the Smithsonian Museum of American History, constructed in the late 1950s; the Cavalcade of America program sponsored by the Du Pont Company; the History Book Club; and the Freedom Train, a museum on rails that traveled the country from 1947 to 1949 exhibiting historic documents and flags, including original copies of the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta.
    It is often said that history is written by the victors, but Christiansen offers a more nuanced perspective: history is constantly remade to suit the objectives of those with the resources to do it. He provides dramatic evidence of sophisticated calculations that influenced both public opinion and historical memory, and shows that Americans’ relationships with the past changed as a result.
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The Channeling Zone
American Spirituality in an Anxious Age
Michael F. Brown
Harvard University Press, 1997

Few expressions of New Age spirituality evoke greater skepticism and derision than does channeling, the practice of serving as a vessel for the voices of ancient or otherworldly beings. Channelers claim to be possessed by angels, aliens, and "ascended masters" who speak through them, offering advice and solace. Intellectuals dismiss them as cranks and charlatans; evangelical Christians accuse them of trafficking with Satanic forces. Meanwhile, the steady spread of channeling from the West Coast to the American heartland fuels the fear that the United States now confronts an epidemic of public irrationality.

The Channeling Zone reveals that this controversial practice has deep roots in earlier forms of American spiritualism while manifesting the most current concerns and anxieties of American life at the end of the twentieth century. Basing his analysis on dozens of interviews with practicing channels and extensive participant-observation research in New Age workshops, Michael Brown takes readers into the world of those who find meaning and inspiration--and occasionally a lucrative career--in regular conversations with spectral beings. Drawing on his previous research among Amazonian Indians, he brings a historical and comparative perspective to the study of this flamboyant expression of contemporary spirituality.

Neither a debunker nor an advocate, Brown weaves together the opinions and life stories of practicing channels and their clients to bring their world and its assumptions into higher relief. He describes the experiences that lead often highly educated, middle-class Americans to conclude that useful information is filtered through the spirit world. He pursues the nature of the quest--the fears, hopes, and expectations of the seekers--and finds its roots in traditional American notions of individualism and self-perfection. The Channeling Zone is a lively journey into the complex social world of the thousands of Americans who have abandoned mainstream religions in search of direct and improvisational contact with spiritual beings.

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The Channels of Student Activism
How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today
Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder
University of Chicago Press, 2022
 An eye-opening analysis of collegiate activism and its effects on the divisions in contemporary American politics. 

The past six years have been marked by a contentious political atmosphere that has touched every arena of public life, including higher education. Though most college campuses are considered ideologically progressive, how can it be that the right has been so successful in mobilizing young people even in these environments?

As Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder show in this surprising analysis of the relationship between political activism on college campuses and the broader US political landscape, while liberal students often outnumber conservatives on college campuses, liberal campus organizing remains removed from national institutions that effectively engage students after graduation. And though they are usually in the minority, conservative student groups have strong ties to national right-leaning organizations, which provide funds and expertise, as well as job opportunities and avenues for involvement after graduation. Though the left is more prominent on campus, the right has built a much more effective system for mobilizing ongoing engagement. What’s more, the conservative college ecosystem has worked to increase the number of political provocations on campus and lower the public’s trust in higher education.
 
 In analyzing collegiate activism from the left, right, and center, The Channels of Student Activism shows exactly how politically engaged college students are channeled into two distinct forms of mobilization and why that has profound consequences for the future of American politics.  
 
 
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Chaos On The Shop Floor
Tom Juravich
Temple University Press, 1988
"Juravich argues that problems in declining American productivity and competitiveness-often and conveniently blamed on workers-can be placed principally in the laps of management." --Socialist Review "[Juravich] provides valuable insights into the operations of a small manufacturing firm, emphasizing the role of worker ‘tradecraft' practiced on the job.... Of greatest interest to institutions with strong sociology/industrial psychology holdings serving upper-division and graduate students, but also relevant for libraries serving vocational and technical students." --Choice From his well-placed vantage point, Juravich has produced an interesting and valuable ethnography of factory life in the industrial periphery.... I recommend this book to those interested in the sociology of work. It is written clearly and straightforwardly, and it is well suited for undergraduate or graduate courses. --Contemporary Sociology
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"Chaotic Freedom" in Civil War Louisiana
The Origins of an Iconic Image
Bruce Laurie
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
The image is terrible and familiar. A man sits, his face in profile, his torso exposed. His back is a breathtaking mass of scars, crisscrossing his body and baring the brutality of American slavery. Reproduced as a carte de visite, the image circulated widely throughout abolitionist networks and was featured in Harper's Weekly. Its undeniable power testified to the evils of slavery. But who was this man and how did this image come to be?

Bruce Laurie uncovers the people and events that created this seminal image, telling the tale of three men, two Yankee soldiers from western Massachusetts who were serving the Union Army in Louisiana and a man named Peter whose scarred back horrified all who saw it. The two soldiers were so shocked by what had been done to Peter, they sought to capture the image and document slavery's cruelty, the likes of which was all too common among those fleeing bondage in Louisiana. Meticulously researched and briskly told, this short volume unearths the story behind an iconic image.
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Character Is Destiny
The Autobiography of Alice Salomon
Andrew Lees, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2004

In her autobiography, the remarkable feminist and social worker Alice Salomon recounts her transition in the 1890s from privileged idleness to energetic engagement in solving social problems. Salomon took the lead in establishing the profession of social work, and built a career as a social reformer, activist, and educator. A prolific author, Salomon also played a key role in the transatlantic dialogue between German and American feminists in the early twentieth century. Her narrative concludes with the account of her expulsion from Germany by the Nazis in 1937.
Salomon's formative influence on the field of social work makes her story crucial for the history of the discipline. This work will also appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of the feminist and socialist movements or the political and social history of twentieth-century Germany. The volume also includes several of Salomon's essays on social work and women's issues, along with photographs of Salomon, her students, and her colleagues.
Andrew Lees is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University, Camden.
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Characteristically American
Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival
Joy M. Giguere
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Prior to the nineteenth century, few Americans knew anything more of Egyptian culture
than what could be gained from studying the biblical Exodus. Napoleon’s invasion of
Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, however, initiated a cultural breakthrough for
Americans as representations of Egyptian culture flooded western museums and publications,
sparking a growing interest in all things Egyptian that was coined Egyptomania.
As Egyptomania swept over the West, a relatively young America began assimilating
Egyptian culture into its own national identity, creating a hybrid national heritage that
would vastly affect the memorial landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Far more than a study of Egyptian revivalism, this book examines the Egyptian style
of commemoration from the rural cemetery to national obelisks to the Sphinx at Mount
Auburn Cemetery. Giguere argues that Americans adopted Egyptian forms of commemoration
as readily as other neoclassical styles such as Greek revivalism, noting that the
American landscape is littered with monuments that define the Egyptian style’s importance
to American national identity. Of particular interest is perhaps America’s greatest
commemorative obelisk: the Washington Monument. Standing at 555 feet high and
constructed entirely of stone—making it the tallest obelisk in the world—the Washington
Monument represents the pinnacle of Egyptian architecture’s influence on America’s desire
to memorialize its national heroes by employing monumental forms associated with
solidity and timelessness. Construction on the monument began in 1848, but controversy
over its design, which at one point included a Greek colonnade surrounding the obelisk,
and the American Civil War halted construction until 1877. Interestingly, Americans saw
the completion of the Washington Monument after the Civil War as a mending of the
nation itself, melding Egyptian commemoration with the reconstruction of America.

As the twentieth century saw the rise of additional commemorative obelisks, the Egyptian
Revival became ensconced in American national identity. Egyptian-style architecture
has been used as a form of commemoration in memorials for World War I and II, the civil
rights movement, and even as recently as the 9/11 remembrances. Giguere places the Egyptian
style in a historical context that demonstrates how Americans actively sought to forge
a national identity reminiscent of Egyptian culture that has endured to the present day.
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Charcoal and Blood
Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada, and the Fish Creek Massacre
Silvio Manno
University of Nevada Press, 2016
Charcoal and Blood is a detailed account of a heinous crime perpetrated on Italian immigrants engaged in the production of charcoal on Nevada’s mining frontier at the close of the nineteenth century. On August 18, 1879, in a canyon near Fish Creek, outside Eureka, Nevada, five Italian charcoal burners were slain and six more were wounded, while fourteen were taken prisoner by a sheriff’s posse.

Through meticulous research on the event, relying on such primary sources as newspaper articles, author Silvio Manno provides the only comprehensive account of Eureka’s charcoal crisis and what came to be known as the Fish Creek Massacre. This is a well-documented narrative history of an important instance of class and ethnic conflict in the West. Readers interested in Nevada history, Italian American history, frontier trade unionism, and mining in the West will find this book a unique examination of an incident that occurred almost a century and a half ago and that has, until now, been largely overlooked.
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Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership
Erica R. Edwards
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership—this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we understand this, Erica R. Edwards tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both the modern black freedom struggle and the black literary tradition.

By considering leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack Obama as both historical personages and narrative inventions of contemporary American culture, Edwards brings to the study of black politics the tools of intertextual narrative analysis as well as deconstruction and close reading. Examining a number of literary restagings of black leadership in African American fiction by W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, William Melvin Kelley, Paul Beatty, and Toni Morrison, Edwards demonstrates how African American literature has contested charisma as a structuring fiction of modern black politics.

Though recent scholarship has challenged top-down accounts of historical change, the presumption that history is made by gifted men continues to hold sway in American letters and life. This may be, Edwards shows us, because while charisma is a transformative historical phenomenon, it carries an even stronger seductive narrative power that obscures the people and methods that have created social and political shifts.

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Charisma under Pressure
Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839
Dan Vogel
Signature Books, 2023
When Joseph Smith entered Kirtland, Ohio, for the first time, he had only the year before established a church and brought forth a new book of scripture, the Book of Mormon. After moving the church and most of its members from western New York and establishing its headquarters at Kirtland—while simultaneously establishing his Zion in communities in Missouri—he oversaw a decade of both peace and prosperity and chaos and conflict. 

But just who was Joseph Smith? What motivated him? In examining Smith’s life during his Ohio and Missouri sojourns, Vogel seeks to answer those questions. But, Vogel is quick to note, “There are, in fact, many possible constructions of Joseph Smith, and depending on how one assesses the evidence for his truth-claims, a completely different Joseph Smith emerges. But this is probably as Smith wanted it.” 

During this period, Smith established a temple, printing presses, additional scripture, expanded church offices, and built a bank—all indicating a sense of permanence and strength for his young church at one level while causing its near collapse at another. 
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Charismatic Capitalism
Direct Selling Organizations in America
Nicole Woolsey Biggart
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Tupperware Home Parties, Shaklee Corporation, Amway, Mary Kay Cosmetics—theirs is an approach to business that violates many of the basic tenets of modern American commerce. Yet these direct selling organizations, fashioned by charismatic leaders and built upon devoted armies of door-to-door representatives, have grown to constitute an $8.5 billion a year industry and provide a livelihood for more than 5 million workers, the vast majority of them women.

The first full-scale study of this industry, Charismatic Capitalism, revises the standard contention that the rationalization of social institutions is an inevitable consequence of advanced capitalism. Nicole Woolsey Biggart argues instead that less rational organizations built on social networks may actually be more economically viable.
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Charitable Choice at Work
Evaluating Faith-Based Job Programs in the States
Sheila Suess Kennedy and Wolfgang Bielefeld
Georgetown University Press, 2006

Too often, say its critics, U.S. domestic policy is founded on ideology rather than evidence. Take "Charitable Choice": legislation enacted with the assumption that faith-based organizations can offer the best assistance to the needy at the lowest cost. The Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act—buttressed by President Bush's Faith-Based Initiative of 2000—encouraged religious organizations, including congregations, to bid on government contracts to provide social services. But in neither year was data available to prove or disprove the effectiveness of such an approach.

Charitable Choice at Work fills this gap with a comprehensive look at the evidence for and against faith-based initiatives. Sheila Suess Kennedy and Wolfgang Bielefeld review the movement's historical context along with legal analysis of constitutional concerns including privatization, federalism, and separation of church and state. Using both qualitative and, where possible, statistical data, the authors analyze the performance of job placement programs in three states with a representative range of religious, political, and demographic traits—Massachusetts, Indiana, and North Carolina. Throughout, they focus on measurable outcomes as they compare non-faith-based with faith-based organizations, nonprofits with for-profits, and the logistics of contracting before and after Charitable Choice.

Among their findings: in states where such information is available, the composition of social service contractor pools has changed very little. Reflecting their varied political cultures, states have funded programs differently. Faith-based organizations have not been eager to seek government contracts, perhaps wary of additional legal restraints and reporting burdens.

The authors conclude that faith-based organizations appear no more effective than secular organizations at government-funded social service provision, that there has been no dramatic change in the social welfare landscape since Charitable Choice, and that the constitutional concerns of its detractors may be valid. This empirical study penetrates the fog of the culture wars, moving past controversy over the role of religion in public life to offer pragmatic suggestions for policymakers and organizations who must decide how best to assist the needy.

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Charles A. Janeway
Pediatrician to the World’s Children
Robert J. Haggerty and Frederick H. Lovejoy, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2007

This biography of one of the most prominent pediatricians of the twentieth century describes his illustrious medical family and his remarkable tenure of nearly three decades as Thomas Morgan Rotch Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and head of the department of medicine at Children's Hospital, Boston. During this period Janeway built the first department of pediatrics in the nation with subspecialties based upon the new developments in basic sciences. Janeway and his colleagues defined the gamma globulin disorders that resulted in children's increased susceptibility to infections and associated arthritic disorders.

Janeway was the most visible U.S. pediatrician on the world scene in the last half of the 20th century. He traveled widely, taught modern pediatrics to thousands of physicians throughout the developing world, and brought many of them to the U.S. for further training. He was instrumental in starting teaching hospitals in Shiraz, Iran, and Cameroon.

Janeway believed that through teaching by example he might further the cause of peace in the world. His life is an inspiration to everyone in medicine, and serves as a model that all can seek to improve the health of the world's millions and promote a more peaceful future.

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Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dilemma
The Conflict of Technology and Human Values
Susan M. Gray
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988
Throughout his life, Lindbergh’s value structure, interests, and activities shifted and moved, yielding a conflict between instinct and intellect. Both its presence in his life and his readjustment of values in accordance with it are representative of his time and culture. He moved, with the twentieth century itself, from a faith in technology to a disenchantment with it and finally to a balanced resolution that synthesized the seeming oppositions of technology and the human spirit. This emphasis on a balance between technology and humanity, and Lindbergh’s belief that maintained the complementarity rather than the opposition of the two forces, finally culminated in a post-technological mysticism, a teleological worldview of science and nature as aspects of the same physical and spiritual environment.
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Charles Brockden Brown
An American Tale
By Alan Axelrod
University of Texas Press, 1983

Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale is the first comprehensive literary, biographical, and cultural study of the novelist whom critic Leslie Fiedler has dubbed "the inventor of the American writer."

The author of Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, Ormond, and Edgar Huntly, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is considered the first American professional author. He introduced Indian characters into American fiction. His keen interest in character delineation and abnormal psychology anticipates the stories of Poe, Hawthorne, and later masters of the psychological novel.

Brown was eager to establish for himself an American identity as a writer, to become what Crèvecoeur called "the new man in the New World." It is especially this intimate identification of writer with country that makes Brown a telling precursor of our most characteristic authors from Poe, Hawthorne, and Cooper to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.

To understand its significance, Brown's work must be examined as both art and artifact. Accordingly, Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale is literary history as well as criticism, embued with insights into a writer's sources and influences and the psychology of literary composition. It is also a fascinating examination of a nation's emotional and intellectual impact on a young man in search of his identity as creative artist.

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Charles E. Hires and the Drink that Wowed a Nation
The Life and Times of a Philadelphia Entrepreneur
Bill Double
Temple University Press, 2018

Introduced at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and powered by an historic advertising campaign, Hires Root Beer—launched 10 years before Coca-Cola—blazed the trail for development of the American soft drink industry. Its inventor, Charles Elmer Hires, has been described as “a tycoon with the soul of a chemist.” In addition to creating root beer, Hires, a devoted family man and a pillar of the Quaker community, became a leading importer of botanical commodities, an authority on the vanilla bean. Starting from scratch, he also built one of the world’s largest condensed milk companies.

Charles E. Hires and the Drink that Wowed a Nation chronicles the humble origin and meteoric business success of this extraordinary entrepreneur. Author Bill Double uses published interviews, correspondence, newspaper reports, magazine articles, financial data, and a small family archive to tell this story of native ingenuity. Here, the rough-hewn capitalism of the gilded age, the evolution of the neighborhood drugstore, the rise of advertising in creating mass markets, and the emerging temperance movement all come together in a biography that, well, fizzes with entrepreneurial spirit.

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Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image
Mary Campbell
University of Chicago Press, 2016
On September 25, 1890, the Mormon prophet Wilford Woodruff publicly instructed his followers to abandon polygamy. In doing so, he initiated a process that would fundamentally alter the Latter-day Saints and their faith. Trading the most integral elements of their belief system for national acceptance, the Mormons recreated themselves as model Americans.

Mary Campbell tells the story of this remarkable religious transformation in Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image. One of the church’s favorite photographers, Johnson (1857–1926) spent the 1890s and early 1900s taking pictures of Mormonism’s most revered figures and sacred sites. At the same time, he did a brisk business in mail-order erotica, creating and selling stereoviews that he referred to as his “spicy pictures of girls.” Situating these images within the religious, artistic, and legal culture of turn-of-the-century America, Campbell reveals the unexpected ways in which they worked to bring the Saints into the nation’s mainstream after the scandal of polygamy.

Engaging, interdisciplinary, and deeply researched, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image demonstrates the profound role pictures played in the creation of both the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the modern American nation.
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Charles Follen's Search for Nationality and Freedom
Germany and America, 1796-1840
Edmund Spevack
Harvard University Press, 1997

This unique account of the life of German nationalist and revolutionary Charles Follen opens a window on several worlds during the first half of the nineteenth century. Seldom does one biography embrace so many important historical issues and events.

Trained as a lawyer in his native Germany, Follen was involved in student nationalism, eventually turning to revolutionary Jacobinism. He fled to Switzerland in 1819 after conspiring in the first political murder of modern German history--the assassination of the playwright August von Kotzebue. In Switzerland, Follen secretly continued activities for revolutionizing Germany. When his plans were discovered in 1824, he fled to America. For ten years, Follen taught at Harvard; he was the first professor of German literature at an American institution of higher learning. He played a central role in the early importation of German ideas to New England, contributing to the fields of literature, philosophy, and theology. His marriage to Eliza Lee Cabot allowed him to move in elite Boston social circles. After his ordination as a Unitarian minister in 1836, Follen combined his interest in social reform (including an ardent devotion to the antislavery movement) with clerical service. Unitarian leader William Ellery Channingand abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison became Follen's close friends.

During the last two years of his life, Follen began to doubt his own power to bring about political change and suffered a crisis in self-confidence before his accidental death at the age of forty-three.

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Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835–1915
The Patrician at Bay
Edward Chase Kirkland
Harvard University Press

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Charles Gates Dawes
A Life
Annette B. Dunlap
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Charles Gates Dawes: A Life is the first comprehensive biography of an American in whose fascinating story contemporary readers can follow the struggles and triumphs of early twentieth-century America and Europe.

Dawes is most known today as vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge, but he also distinguished himself and his hometown of Evanston, Illinois, on the world stage with the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize. This engrossing biography traces how, when the punitive armistice that ended the First World War resulted in a disabled, restive Germany, Dawes’s diplomatic legerdemain averted war through a renegotiation of Germany’s debt repayments.

Dawes’s diplomatic and political achievements, however, were only the illustrious capstones to a multifaceted career that included military service, law, finance, and business on the local, state, national, and global stages. In every arena of his life, he combined the social graces of the Gilded Age with the spirit of service of the Progressive Era.

Despite his life of disciplined service, Dawes was an ebullient and irrepressible figure. Dawes’s salty language was often colorful fodder for tabloid and magazine writers of his era. In this captivating biography, Annette B. Dunlap recounts the story of an original American who enlightened and enlivened his world.

This book was published in cooperation with the Evanston History Center and with generous support from the Tawani Foundation.
 

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Charles Ives in the Mirror
American Histories of an Iconic Composer
David C. Paul
University of Illinois Press, 2013
American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) has gone from being a virtual unknown to become one of the most respected and lauded composers in American music. In this sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, David C. Paul tells the new story of how Ives's music was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture, charting the changes in the reception of Ives across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Paul focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein.

Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a concert staple of his "Concord" Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of "American maverick" composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties.

By embedding Ives' reception within the changing developments of a wide range of fields including intellectual history, American studies, literature, musicology, and American politics and society in general, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer greatly advances our understanding of Ives and his influence on nearly a century of American culture.

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Charles Lee
Self Before Country
Mazzagetti, Dominick
Rutgers University Press, 2013

Received an Honorable Mention for the American Revolution Round Table of Richmond's 2014 Book Award

Dominick Mazzagetti presents an engaging account of the life of Charles Lee, the forgotten man of the American Revolution. History has not been kind to Lee—for good reason. In this compelling biography, Mazzagetti compares Lee’s life and attributes to those of George Washington and offers significant observations omitted from previous Lee biographies, including extensive correspondence with British officers in 1777 that reflects Lee’s abandonment of the Patriots’ cause.

Lee, a British officer, a veteran of the French and Indian War, and a critic of King George III, arrived in New York City in 1773 with an ego that knew no bounds and tolerated no rivals.  A highly visible and newsworthy personality, he quickly took up the American cause and encouraged rebellion. As a result of this advocacy and his military skills, Lee was granted a commission as a major general in the Continental Army and soon became second-in-command to George Washington. He helped organize the defense of Boston, designed defenses for New York City, and commanded the force that repelled the British attack on Charleston.

Upon his return to New York in 1776, Lee was considered by some leaders of the Revolution to be an alternative to George Washington, who was in full retreat from British forces. Lee’s capture by the British in December 1776 put an end to that possibility. Lee’s subsequent release in a prisoner exchange in 1778 and return to an American command led to a dramatic confrontation with Washington on the battlefield at Monmouth, New Jersey, in June 1778. Washington chastised Lee publicly for ordering an unnecessary retreat. Lee suffered the ignominy of a court-martial conviction for this blunder and spent the remaining years to his death in 1782 attacking Washington. Although few doubted Lee’s loyalty at the time, his actions at Monmouth fueled speculation that he switched sides during his imprisonment.

A discovery years after his death completed Lee’s tale. In 1862, a researcher discovered “Mr. Lee’s Plan,” a detailed strategy for the defeat of the American rebels delivered to British General William Howe while Lee was held in captivity. This discovery sealed Lee’s historical record and ended all further discussion of his contributions to the American Revolution. Today, few people even realize that Fort Lee, on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, was named in his honor.

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Charles Ludlam Lives!
Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company
Sean F. Edgecomb
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Playwright, actor and director Charles Ludlam (1943–1987) helped to galvanize the Ridiculous style of theater in New York City starting in the 1960s.  Decades after his death, his place in the chronicle of American theater has remained constant, but his influence has changed.  Although his Ridiculous Theatrical Company shut its doors, the Ludlamesque Ridiculous has continued to thrive and remain a groundbreaking genre, maintaining its relevance and potency by metamorphosing along with changes in the LGBTQ community.  
Author Sean F. Edgecomb focuses on the neo-Ridiculous artists Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, and Taylor Mac to trace the connections between Ludlam’s legacy and their performances, using alternative queer models such as kinetic kinship, lateral historiography, and a new approach to camp. Charles Ludlam Lives! demonstrates that the queer legacy of Ludlam is one of distinct transformation—one where artists can reject faithful interpretations in order to move in new interpretive directions.

 
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Charles Ludlam Lives!
Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company
Sean F. Edgecomb
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Playwright, actor and director Charles Ludlam (1943–1987) helped to galvanize the Ridiculous style of theater in New York City starting in the 1960s.  Decades after his death, his place in the chronicle of American theater has remained constant, but his influence has changed.  Although his Ridiculous Theatrical Company shut its doors, the Ludlamesque Ridiculous has continued to thrive and remain a groundbreaking genre, maintaining its relevance and potency by metamorphosing along with changes in the LGBTQ community.  
Author Sean F. Edgecomb focuses on the neo-Ridiculous artists Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, and Taylor Mac to trace the connections between Ludlam’s legacy and their performances, using alternative queer models such as kinetic kinship, lateral historiography, and a new approach to camp. Charles Ludlam Lives! demonstrates that the queer legacy of Ludlam is one of distinct transformation—one where artists can reject faithful interpretations in order to move in new interpretive directions.

 
[more]

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Charles Olson's Reading
A Biography
Ralph Maud
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

In this narrative account of the life and work of Charles Olson, Ralph Maud focuses on what the poet read as a basis for understanding the work he produced.

To an extraordinary degree, Olson’s reading and life were coextensive, according to Maud, who notes that Olson saw his written output over his lifetime as a total cosmology. An individual who rarely traveled, this major American poet explored the world and its history as well as the furthest reaches of the thought of his day through books.

Maud builds upon George Butterick’s annotated listing of Olson’s library, bought by the University of Connecticut after the poet’s death in 1970. The present volume, however, adds categories of books Butterick deliberately omitted: Olson’s childhood books and poetry by his own contemporaries.

Linking Olson’s books to his intellectual and poetic development at each stage of his career, Maud reveals such little-known but important connections as the contracted book project "Operation Red, White and Black" and Olson’s plan for the long poem "West"—two unrealized projects much later shaped into The Maximus Poems.

Maud also outlines the surprisingly multiple role of the painter Corrado Cagli, who brought home to Olson the significance of the Holocaust and introduced him both to the Tarot and to the theories of non-Euclidean geometry that Olson variously incorporated into his poems and essays. In discussing Olson’s relationship to Ezra Pound, Maud defines in some detail what Olson gained from Pound and what he repudiated.

Maud refutes the notion that Olson’s intellectual and creative powers declined during the last years of his life, demonstrating that during these years Olson developed his Jungian interest, his attention to early Greek thought, and a new concern for Northern mythology.

This chronicle of Olson’s reading from childhood to deathbed constitutes a critical biography of the larger-than-life author of Call Me Ishmael and The Maximus Poems. No modern poet is more revealed in his sources than Olson. Maud’s comprehensive and complete study provides a basis for new and fresh modes of thinking about Olson’s great achievement.

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Charles Seeger
A Life in American Music
Ann M. Pescatello
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992
Ann M. Pescatello presents the first biography of Charles Seeger, who was a force in American music for most of the twentieth century. Part composer, teacher, performer, musicologist, bureaucrat, and inventor-Seeger's ninety-two year life touched many people and many areas of American music. As both a traditionalist and champion of the new, he established the University of California's music department and the nation's first curriculum in musicology, and taught at the Institute of Musical Arts (later Julliard), and at the New School in New York. He was also a music activist-defending the artistic value of American folk music, and seeking global cooperation for musical enterprise at the Resettlement administraion, the WPA, and the Pan American Union.
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Charles Sheeler and Cult of the Machine
Karen Lucic
Harvard University Press, 1991

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henry Adams proclaimed that the machine was as central to our modem American culture as the Virgin was to medieval culture. We worshiped in our factories as our ancestors worshiped in cathedrals. In this century we also raised up bridges, grain elevators, and skyscrapers, and many were dazzled by these symbols of the Machine Age--from American presidents such as Calvin Coolidge to European artists such as Marcel Duchamp. Charles Sheeler (1886-1965) was one of the most noted American painters and photographers to embrace the iconography of the machine. But was he high priest or heretic in the religion of mass production and technology that dominated his era?

Karen Lucic considers this intriguing question while telling us Sheeler's story: his coming of age, his achievement of artistic independence in the teens and twenties, and his later treatments of Machine Age subjects throughout the years of the Depression and World War II. The author shows us how--in paintings, drawings, and photographs depicting New York skyscrapers, Henry Ford's automobile factories, and machine-dominated interiors--Sheeler produced images of extraordinary aesthetic power that provocatively confirmed America's technological and industrial prestige in clear, vivid, and exact detail.

Do these compelling works establish Sheeler as a champion of the Machine Age? Most of the artist's contemporaries thought so. "Sheeler was objective before the rest of us were," claimed his friend Edward Steichen, and critics either lauded or assailed Sheeler for his seemingly straightforward acceptance of the machine. He is misunderstood today for the same reason. In the post-industrial era, Sheeler has been attacked for objectifying his subjects, for eliminating the human element from the modern landscape, and ultimately for complicity in the mechanization of the world he so accurately portrayed.

By closely investigating Sheeler's social and aesthetic contexts and through exceptionally clear and convincing visual analysis, Karen Lucic reinterprets the work of this important modernist. She argues that his images do not celebrate the machine but question its predominance during his time. They provoke us to confront the social consequences of modern technology.

Sheeler appears in this book as neither believer nor heretic in the cult of the machine. Lucic asks us to grant Sheeler his ambivalence, for it was his ambivalence that enabled him to portray modernity so splendidly.

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The Charleston Orphan House
Children's Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America
John E. Murray
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The first public orphanage in America, the Charleston Orphan House saw to the welfare and education of thousands of children from poor white families in the urban South. From wealthy benefactors to the families who sought its assistance to the artisans and merchants who relied on its charges as apprentices, the Orphan House was a critical component of the city’s social fabric. By bringing together white citizens from all levels of society, it also played a powerful political role in maintaining the prevailing social order.
 
John E. Murray tells the story of the Charleston Orphan House for the first time through the words of those who lived there or had family members who did. Through their letters and petitions, the book follows the families from the events and decisions that led them to the Charleston Orphan House through the children’s time spent there to, in a few cases, their later adult lives. What these accounts reveal are families struggling to maintain ties after catastrophic loss and to preserve bonds with children who no longer lived under their roofs.
 
An intimate glimpse into the lives of the white poor in early American history, The Charleston Orphan House is moreover an illuminating look at social welfare provision in the antebellum South.
[more]

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Charlie Chaplin, Director
Donna Kornhaber
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema’s consummate comic performers, yet he has long been criticized as a lackluster film director. In this groundbreaking work—the first to analyze Chaplin’s directorial style—Donna Kornhaber radically recasts his status as a filmmaker. Spanning Chaplin’s career, Kornhaber discovers a sophisticated "Chaplinesque" visual style that draws from early cinema and slapstick and stands markedly apart from later, "classical" stylistic conventions. His is a manner of filmmaking that values space over time and simultaneity over sequence, crafting narrative and meaning through careful arrangement within the frame rather than cuts between frames. Opening up aesthetic possibilities beyond the typical boundaries of the classical Hollywood film, Chaplin’s filmmaking would profoundly influence directors from Fellini to Truffaut. To view Chaplin seriously as a director is to re-understand him as an artist and to reconsider the nature and breadth of his legacy.

 
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America
Edited by Jill Bergman
University of Alabama Press, 2017
A compelling critical investigation into Gilman’s conception of setting and place

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman’s Place in America is a pioneering collection that probes how depictions of space, confinement, and liberation establish both the difficulty and necessity of female empowerment. Turning Victorian notions of propriety and a woman’s place on its ear, this finely crafted essay collection studies Gilman’s writings and the manner in which they push back against societal norms and reject male-dominated confines of space.

The contributors present fascinating and innovative readings of some of Gilman’s most significant works. By examining the settings in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland, for example, the volume analyzes Gilman’s construction of place, her representations of male dominance and female subjugation, and her analysis of the rules and obligations that women feel in conforming to their assigned place: the home.
 
Additionally, this volume delineates female resistance to this conformity. Contributors highlight how Gilman’s narrators often choose resistance over obedient captivity, breaking free of the spaces imposed upon them in order to seek or create their own habitats. Through biographical interpretations of Gilman’s work that focus on the author’s own renouncement of her “natural” role of wife and mother, contributors trace her relocation to the American West in an attempt to appropriate the masculinized spaces of work and social organization.
 
Engaging, well-researched, and deftly written, the essays in this collection will appeal to scholars of Gilman, literature, and gender issues alike.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries
Literary and Intellectual Contexts
Edited by Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Considers Gilman’s place in American literary and social history by examining her relationships to other prominent intellectuals of her era

By placing Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the company of her contemporaries, this collection seeks to correct misunderstandings of the feminist writer and lecturer as an isolated radical. Gilman believed and preached that no life is ever led in isolation; indeed, the cornerstone of her philosophy was the idea that “humanity is a relation.”
 
Gilman's highly public and combative stances as a critic and social activist brought her into contact and conflict with many of the major thinkers and writers of the period, including Mary Austin, Margaret Sanger, Ambrose Bierce, Grace Ellery Channing, Lester Ward, Inez Haynes Gillmore, William Randolph Hearst, Karen Horney, William Dean Howells, Catharine Beecher, George Bernard Shaw, and Owen Wister. Gilman wrote on subjects as wide ranging as birth control, eugenics, race, women's rights and suffrage, psychology, Marxism, and literary aesthetics. Her many contributions to social, intellectual, and literary life at the turn of the 20th century raised the bar for future discourse, but at great personal and professional cost.
 
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
New Texts, New Contexts
Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler
The Ohio State University Press, 2011
During her lifetime, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a popular writer, public speaker, and social reformer whose literary interests ranged from short stories, novels, and nonfiction philosophical studies to poetry, newspaper columns, plays, and many other genres. Though she fell into obscurity after her death, there has been a resurgence of interest in Gilman’s works among literary scholars.
 
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts represents a new phase of feminist scholarship in recovery, drawing readers’ attention to Gilman’s lesser-known works from fresh perspectives that revise what we thought we knew about the author and her work. Volume contributors consider an array of texts that have not yet enjoyed adequate critical scrutiny, including Gilman’s short fiction, drama, and writing for periodicals, as well as her long fiction. Similarly, incorporating careful archival, biographical, and historical research, contributors explore Gilman’s life and writings—including her most famous story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”—through strikingly new critical lenses. Other essays included here assess Gilman’s place in a longer historical trajectory and within multiple rhetorical traditions, from the genre of feminist humor to the canon of African American women’s literary production.
 
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Optimist Reformer
Jill Rudd
University of Iowa Press, 1999
“These essays exemplify all the virtues of interdisciplinarity in consideration of that most multidisciplined of writers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The contributors simultaneously clarify and complicate our understanding of some of the more vexed areas of Gilman's work by engaging saliently with her theories of ethnicity, class, prostitution, and the dynamics of gender; posing difficult questions to contemporary feminist scholars; and providing sensitive and insightful guidance to a well-chosen and wide range of texts.”—Janet Beer, author of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction
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Charlotte's Rose
A. E. Cannon
University of Utah Press, 2011

Charlotte’s Rose—justifiably back in print—tells the story of a young Welsh girl, Charlotte Edwards, who, soon after her mother dies, sails with her father from England to the United States to become part of a company of Mormon handcart pioneers—emigrants with no horses or oxen who themselves pulled the heavy carts filled with their belongings. These were arduous journeys. While on the Mormon Trail, Charlotte befriends a young mother who later dies in childbirth. Though only 12 years old, Charlotte assumes responsibility for the infant and carries her to Utah. Over the course of their journey together, Charlotte becomes deeply attached to the baby she calls Rose, which makes Charlotte’s choice at the novel’s end particularly poignant.

The author, A. E. Cannon, is adept at creating vivid, multifaceted, believable characters and has crafted a story of pioneers that will seem relevant to today’s young people. The reader will quickly be drawn into the story as Charlotte struggles to navigate the trials of an adolescent moving into adulthood. Although this is a book about Mormon pioneers, it is in fact about the larger American experience of immigration—a drama still unfolding today­—and Charlotte’s coming-of-age journey will resonate with readers young and old.
 

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The Charter School Landscape
Sandra Vergari
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002
Charter schools are publicly funded entities that enjoy freedom from many of the regulations under which traditional public schools operate. There are, however, state and local variations in charter school legislation and implementation. The Charter School Landscape is the first book to analyze and compare charter school politics and policies across a broad range of jurisdictions.

The first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992. Within nine years, there were more than 2,000 charter schools operating in thirty-four states, Washington, D.C., and Alberta, Canada. Public discourse on the charter school reform is often passionate and politically motivated. Sandra Vergari has assembled a group of experts to present a more reflective and scholarly discussion of the reform, its performance to date, and its implications for public policy.

Each chapter focuses on a single state or province, and systematically addresses such issues as charter school laws, the politics of policy implementation, charter school accountability, controversies and trends, and prospects for the future. In addition, the contributors emphasize significant issues specific to each state that offer lessons for analysts and policymakers everywhere. As a whole, The Charter School Landscape suggests that charter schools are having a significant impact on the institution of public education and how we think about the concept of the "real public school.”
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Chasing Arizona
One Man’s Yearlong Obsession with the Grand Canyon State
Ken Lamberton
University of Arizona Press, 2015
It seemed like a simple plan—visit fifty-two places in fifty-two weeks. But for author Ken Lamberton, a forty-five-year veteran of life in the Sonoran Desert, the entertaining results were anything but easy. In Chasing Arizona, Lamberton takes readers on a yearlong, twenty-thousand-mile joyride across Arizona during its centennial, racking up more than two hundred points of interest along the way.
 
Lamberton chases the four corners of Arizona, attempts every county, every reservation, and every national monument and state park, from the smallest community to the largest city. He drives his Kia Rio through the longest tunnels and across the highest suspension bridges, hikes the hottest deserts, and climbs the tallest mountain, all while visiting the people, places, and treasures that make Arizona great.
 
In the vivid, lyrical, often humorous prose the author is known for, each destination weaves together stories of history, nature, and people, along with entertaining side adventures and excursions. Maps and forty-four of the author’s detailed pencil drawings illustrate the journey.
 
Chasing Arizona is unlike any book of its kind. It is an adventure story, a tale of Arizona, a road-warrior narrative. It is a quest to see and experience as much of Arizona as possible. Through intimate portrayals of people and place, readers deeply experience the Grand Canyon State and at the same time celebrate what makes Arizona a wonderful place to visit and live.
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Chasing Newsroom Diversity
From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action
Gwyneth Mellinger
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Social change triggered by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s sent the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) on a fifty-year mission to dismantle an exclusionary professional standard that envisioned the ideal journalist as white, straight, and male. In this book, Gwyneth Mellinger explores the complex history of the decades-long ASNE diversity initiative, which culminated in the failed Goal 2000 effort to match newsroom demographics with those of the U.S. population.
 
Drawing upon exhaustive reviews of ASNE archival materials, Mellinger examines the democratic paradox through the lens of the ASNE, an elite organization that arguably did more than any other during the twentieth century to institutionalize professional standards in journalism and expand the concepts of government accountability and the free press. The ASNE would emerge in the 1970s as the leader in the newsroom integration movement, but its effort would be frustrated by structures of exclusion the organization had embedded into its own professional standards. Explaining why a project so promising failed so profoundly, Chasing Newsroom Diversity expands our understanding of the intransigence of institutional racism, gender discrimination, and homophobia within democracy.

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Chasing the Stars
How the Astronomers of Observatory Hill Transformed Our Understanding of the Universe
James Lattis
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2024
A richly illustrated history of Wisconsin’s astronomical innovations

Explore the remarkable story of Wisconsin astronomers whose curiosity, persistence, and innovation helped us better understand our universe. 

Chasing the Stars traces the history of the University of Wisconsin’s Washburn Observatory, where some of the world’s most cutting-edge astronomical inventions were born. Learn about the earliest Indigenous stargazers, the women who worked as the first human computers, the astronomers who sold time by the stars, the scientists who shrank the Milky Way, and the crucial role Wisconsin astronomers played in the development of modern astrophysics and space astronomy.

This extraordinary book features more than 100 modern and historic photographs that illustrate the people and science behind Wisconsin’s astronomical innovations. Designed for lay readers and astronomers alike, Chasing the Stars inspires all of us to look up at the sky in wonder.
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Chattanooga, 1865-1900
A City Set Down in Dixie
Tim Ezzell
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
After the Civil War, the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, forged a different path than most southern urban centers. Long a portal to the Deep South, Chattanooga was largely rebuilt by northern men, using northern capital, and imbued with northern industrial values. As such, the city served as a cultural and economic nexus between North and South, and its northern elite stood out distinctively from the rest of the region’s booster class. In Chattanooga, 1865–1900, Tim Ezzell explores Chattanooga’s political and economic development from the close of the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century, revealing how this unique business class adapted, prospered, and governed in the postwar South.
    After reviewing Chattanooga’s wartime experience, Ezzell chronicles political and economic developments in the city over the next two generations. White Republicans, who dominated municipal government thanks to the support of Chattanooga’s large African American population, clashed repeatedly with Democrats, who worked to “redeem” the city from Republican rule and restore “responsible,” “efficient” government. Ezzell shows that, despite the efforts by white Democrats to undermine black influence, black Chattanoogans continued to wield considerable political leverage into the 1890s.
     On the economic front, an extensive influx of northern entrepreneurs and northern capital into postwar Chattanooga led to dynamic if unstable growth. Ezzell details the city’s efforts to compete with Birmingham as the center of southern iron and steel production.  At times, this vision was within reach, but these hopes faded by the 1890s, and Chattanooga grew into something altogether different: not northern, not southern, but something peculiar “set down in Dixie.”
    Although Chattanooga never reached its Yankee boosters’ ideal of “a northern industrial city at home in the southern hills,” Ezzell demonstrates that it forged a legacy of resilience and resourcefulness that continues to serve the community to the present day.
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Chattanooga
A Death Grip on the Confederacy
James Lee Mcdonough
University of Tennessee Press, 1984
In the wake of the bloodshed at Chickamauga, the struggle for Chattanooga became a decisive engagement of the Civil War. McDonough reconstructs the siege and battles as they appeared to both Rebels and Yankees, giving the reader a front-row seat at one of the major dramas in American history.
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The Chattanooga Campaign
Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

When the Confederates emerged as victors in the Chickamauga Campaign, the Union Army of the Cumberland lay under siege in Chattanooga, with Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee on nearby high ground at Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. A win at Chattanooga was essential for the Confederates, both to capitalize on the victory at Chickamauga and to keep control of the gateway to the lower South. Should the Federal troops wrest control of that linchpin, they would cement their control of eastern Tennessee and gain access to the Deep South. In the fall 1863 Chattanooga Campaign, the new head of the western Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant, sought to break the Confederate siege. His success created the opportunity for the Union to start a campaign to capture Atlanta the following spring.

Woodworth’s introduction sets the stage for ten insightful essays that provide new analysis of this crucial campaign. From the Battle of Wauhatchie to the Battle of Chattanooga, the contributors’  well-researched and vividly written assessments of both Union and Confederate actions offer a balanced discussion of the complex nature of the campaign and its aftermath. Other essays give fascinating  examinations of the reactions to the campaign in northern newspapers and by Confederate soldiers from west of the Mississippi River.

Complete with maps and photos, The Chattanooga Campaign contains a wealth of detailed information about the military, social, and political aspects of the campaign and contributes significantly to our  understanding of the Civil War’s western theater.

Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 edition

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CHEAP SEATS
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S ADVANTAGE IN U.S. HOUSE ELECTIONS
JAMES CAMPBELL
The Ohio State University Press, 1996

The longest continuous majority in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives came to a dramatic close with the 1994 midterm elections. The Democratic Party had controlled the House for forty years—two and a half times as long as any previous majority. In Cheap Seats, James E. Campbell considers the reasons why the Democrats dominated House elections for four decades and why they ultimately lost that control.

Examining the structural advantages that helped congressional Democrats, Campbell finds that their unprecedented success in the House was due in no small measure to a favorable election system, an advantage in the way in which votes are translated into House seats. His straightforward analysis indicates that Democrats consistently win most of the very-low-turnout districts, or “cheap seats.” In fact, because of the party's continued hold on such districts, the new Democratic minority is considerably larger than it would otherwise have been.

Cheap Seats is a thorough and innovative investigation into the electoral system's impact on partisan politics and representation in Congress. Campbell presents an impressive array of evidence, including both quantitative analysis of election returns from 1936 to 1994 and in-depth studies of several cheap-seat districts. He also explores the important theoretical issues of representation that cheap seats raise and offers several proposals to reform the system. This well-written and provocative volume is accessible to anyone interested in American politics, in addition to scholars especially interested in the areas of Congress, elections, electoral systems, and political parties.

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Cheap Threats
Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States
Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain
Georgetown University Press

Why do weak states resist threats of force from the United States, especially when history shows that this superpower carries out its ultimatums? Cheap Threats upends conventional notions of power politics and challenges assumptions about the use of compellent military threats in international politics.

Drawing on an original dataset of US compellence from 1945 to 2007 and four in-depth case studies—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 2011 confrontation with Libya, and the 1991 and 2003 showdowns with Iraq—Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain finds that US compellent threats often fail because threatening and using force became comparatively “cheap” for the United States after the Cold War. Becoming the world’s only superpower and adopting a new light-footprint model of war, which relied heavily on airpower and now drones, have reduced the political, economic, and human costs that US policymakers face when they go to war. Paradoxically, this lower-cost model of war has cheapened US threats and fails to signal to opponents that the United States is resolved to bear the high costs of a protracted conflict. The result: small states gamble, often unwisely, that the United States will move on to a new target before achieving its goals.

Cheap Threats resets the bar for scholars and planners grappling with questions of state resolve, hegemonic stability, effective coercion, and other issues pertinent in this new era of US warfighting and diplomacy.

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Cheaper by the Hour
Temporary Lawyers and the Deprofessionalization of the Law
Authored by Robert A. Brooks
Temple University Press, 2012

Recent law school graduates often work as temporary attorneys, but law firm layoffs and downsizing have strengthened the temporary attorney industry. Cheaper by the Hour is the first book-length account of these workers.

Drawing from participant observation and interviews, Robert A. Brooks provides a richly detailed ethnographic account of freelance attorneys in Washington, DC. He places their document review work in the larger context of the deprofessionalization of skilled labor and considers how professionals relegated to temporary jobs feel diminished, degraded, or demeaned by work that is often tedious, repetitive, and well beneath their abilities.

Brooks documents how firms break a lawyer's work into discrete components that require less skill to realize maximum profits. Moreover, he argues that information technology and efficiency demands are further stratifying the profession and creating a new underclass of lawyers who do low-end commodity work.

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Cheatgrass
Fire and Forage on the Range
James A. Young
University of Nevada Press, 2009

Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is an exotic species that appeared in North America in the late nineteenth century and has since become a dominant plant in the arid and semiarid rangelands between the Sierra Nevadas, Cascades, and Rocky Mountains. It is the first grass to appear after the region's long, cold winters and thus has become an important forage plant for livestock and wildlife. Cheatgrass is also a major environmental hazard in the sagebrush plant communities where it has established itself, providing highly combustible fuel for the wildfires that have ravaged so much of the Great Basin since the mid-twentieth century. Cheatgrass is the first comprehensive study of this highly invasive plant that has changed the ecology of millions of acres of western rangeland. Authors Young and Clements have researched the biology and impact of cheatgrass for four decades. Their book addresses the subject from several perspectives: the history of the invasion; the origins and biology of cheatgrass; its genetic variations, breeding systems, and patterns of distribution; its impact on grazing management; and the role it plays, both positive and negative, in the lives of high desert wildlife.

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Cheating the Spread
Gamblers, Point Shavers, and Game Fixers in College Football and Basketball
Albert J. Figone
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Delving into the history of gambling and corruption in intercollegiate sports, Cheating the Spread recounts all of the major gambling scandals in college football and basketball. Digging through court records, newspapers, government documents, and university archives and conducting private interviews, Albert J. Figone finds that game rigging has been pervasive and nationwide throughout most of the sports' history. The insidious practice has spread to implicate not only bookies and unscrupulous gamblers but also college administrators, athletic organizers, coaches, fellow students, and the athletes themselves.
 
Naming the players, coaches, gamblers, and go-betweens involved, Figone discusses numerous college basketball and football games reported to have been fixed and describes the various methods used to gain unfair advantage, inside information, or undue profit. His survey of college football includes early years of gambling on games between established schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Harvard; Notre Dame's All-American halfback and skilled gambler George Gipp; and the 1962 allegations of insider information between Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and former Georgia coach James Wallace "Wally" Butts; and many other recent incidents. Notable events in basketball include the 1951 scandal involving City College of New York and six other schools throughout the East Coast and the Midwest; the 1961 point-shaving incident that put a permanent end to the Dixie Classic tournament; the 1978 scheme in which underworld figures recruited and bribed several Boston College players to ensure a favorable point spread; the 1994-95 Northwestern scandal in which players bet against their own team; and other recent examples of compromised gameplay and gambling.
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Checkbook Zionism
Philanthropy and Power in the Israel-Diaspora Relationship
Eric Fleisch
Rutgers University Press, 2024
American Jews donate approximately $2.5 billion to Israel each year. Behind all that money and influence lies a power-sharing dynamic that has left an indelible mark on the relationship between Israeli and American Jews and on the direction of Israeli society to this day. Checkbook Zionism investigates how both parties have managed their interests, emotions, and attitudes about the important yet at times tense collaboration between them.

By delving into the history of American Jews’ philanthropic giving to Israelis, Fleisch assesses the core nature of power sharing between both sides of the Jewish diaspora to the United States through in-depth contemporary case studies of the relationship between sixteen non-governmental organizations and their American Jewish donors. Field observation, document analysis, and interviews with leaders, activists, and select donors alike serve a critical role here, as Fleisch assesses whether these contemporary philanthropic associations repeat classic dynamics of power-sharing or whether they represent a marked departure from the Checkbook Zionism of old. The result is a new paradigm for evaluating power sharing that can be applied to future considerations of development in the Israel-Diaspora relationship. 
 
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Checklist for Change
Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise
Zemsky, Robert
Rutgers University Press, 2013
Almost every day American higher education is making news with a list of problems that includes the incoherent nature of the curriculum, the resistance of the faculty to change, and the influential role of the federal government both through major investments in student aid and intrusive policies. Checklist for Change not only diagnoses these problems, but also provides constructive recommendations for practical change.

Robert Zemsky details the complications that have impeded every credible reform intended to change American higher education. He demythologizes such initiatives as the Morrill Act, the GI Bill, and the Higher Education Act of 1972, shedding new light on their origins and the ways they have shaped higher education in unanticipated and not commonly understood ways. Next, he addresses overly simplistic arguments about the causes of the problems we face and builds a convincing argument that well-intentioned actions have combined to create the current mess for which everyone is to blame.

Using provocative case studies, Zemsky describes the reforms being implemented at a few institutions with the hope that these might serve as harbingers of the kinds of change needed: the University of Minnesota at Rochester’s compact curriculum in the health sciences only, Whittier College’s emphasis on learning outcomes, and the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh’s coherent overall curriculum.

In conclusion, Zemsky describes the principal changes that must occur not singly but in combination. These include a fundamental recasting of federal financial aid; new mechanisms for better channeling the competition among colleges and universities; recasting the undergraduate curriculum; and a stronger, more collective faculty voice in governance that defines not why, but how the enterprise must change.
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Checklist of Library Building Design Considerations
William W. Sannwald
American Library Association, 2016

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Checklist of Library Building Design Considerations
William W. Sannwald
American Library Association, 2009

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Cheers to Michigan
A Celebration of Cocktail Culture and Craft Distillers
Tammy Coxen and Lester Graham
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Cheers to Michigan is a toast to cocktail culture in the Mitten and the state’s flourishing craft cocktail and distillery movements. Based on Cheers!, Lester Graham and Tammy Coxen’s popular cocktail segment on Michigan Radio (NPR), this book gathers forty-five of the authors’ favorite cocktail recipes celebrating the Great Lakes State—its history, its people, its culture, even its weather! Throughout, the authors mix in dashes of Michigan’s fascinating drinking history, entertaining profiles of award-winning cocktail bars, distilleries, and individual spirits from the region, as well as helpful tidbits for preparing top-shelf cocktails on your own.

Learn how to mix a Bullshot, the Detroit-born cocktail containing Campbell’s Beef Broth—Marilyn Monroe famously called the drink “a horrible thing to do to vodka.” Or try out the authors’ Whiskey Sour recipe honoring the true story of Valentine Goesaert, a Dearborn woman who challenged the constitutionality of a Michigan law prohibiting female bartenders and in 1948 took her case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Whether you’re a fan of whiskey, gin, or vodka—of the latest cocktail trends or all-time classic drinks—there’s something in this book for all tastes. What’s constant is that each drink showcases a uniquely Michigan twist, making this book perfect for anyone who loves the state, its history and culture, or simply the delicious, delightful, and distinctive cocktails it has inspired.

 
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Cheese War
Conflict and Courage in Tillamook County, Oregon
Marilyn Milne
Oregon State University Press, 2022
In the 1960s, Tillamook County, Oregon, was at war with itself. As the regional dairy industry shifted from small local factories to larger consolidated factories, and as profit margins for milk and cheese collapsed, Tillamook farmers found themselves in a financial crisis that fueled multiple disputes. The ensuing Cheese War included lies and secrets, as well as spies, high emotion, a shoving match, and even a death threat.

On one side of the battle was Beale Dixon, head of Tillamook County Creamery Association. Dixon set up a scheme to offer low-interest, low-collateral loans from TCCA’s largest member cooperative, Tillamook Cheese & Dairy Association, to the supermarkets that stocked Tillamook products. Dixon argued it was a cheap, easy way to ensure good will—and continued purchases—in a tight market. On the other side was George Milne, a respected farmer and board president of the cooperative. Milne supported his board’s decision that loans would require board approval and bank oversight. Dixon mostly ignored those requirements.

The discovery of more financial irregularities soon spiraled  into a community-wide dispute, exacerbated by a complex web of family and business relationships. The Cheese War raged for the better part of a decade across board meetings, courtrooms, and the community itself. While largely unknown outside of Tillamook County, the Cheese War was so divisive that some families remain fractured today.

Sisters Marilyn Milne and Linda Kirk, children of the Cheese War, saw how it absorbed their parents. As adults, they set out to learn more about what had happened. The authors conducted years of research and have integrated it with tales of their experiences as farm kids living through the all-consuming fight. As Americans become ever more interested in food supply chains and ethical consumption, here is the story of the very human factors behind one of Oregon’s most iconic brands.
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Chemical Alert!
A Community Action Handbook
Edited by Marvin S. Legator and Sabrina F. Strawn
University of Texas Press, 1993

In the 1978 Love Canal toxic waste crisis, concerned citizens "did a far better job of evaluating the health of the community than did the professionals of the New York Health Department," asserts Marvin Legator. In Chemical Alert! A Community Action Handbook, he and coeditor Sabrina Strawn offer a step-by-step guide that can be used by any lay person or citizens' group to determine whether a health risk exists in their area.

Writing for the general reader with no scientific expertise, environmental, medical, and legal professionals instruct communities on the organizational and investigative techniques that will produce a valid, scientific case study. With these tools, citizens living near petrochemical plants or waste disposal areas—or who may have simply noticed a high incidence of certain health problems in their community—can determine for themselves whether a problem really exists and seek remediation. Given the reality that government agencies often lack the resources—or the will—to detect health hazards before they affect a community, an informed citizenry should be its own best environmental watchdog.

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Chemical Heroes
Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military
Andrew Bickford
Duke University Press, 2020
In Chemical Heroes Andrew Bickford analyzes the US military's attempts to design performance enhancement technologies and create pharmacological "supersoldiers" capable of withstanding extreme trauma. Bickford traces the deep history of efforts to biologically fortify and extend the health and lethal power of soldiers from the Cold War era into the twenty-first century, from early adoptions of mandatory immunizations to bio-protective gear, to the development and spread of new performance enhancing drugs during the global War on Terrorism. In his examination of government efforts to alter soldiers' bodies through new technologies, Bickford invites us to contemplate what constitutes heroism when armor becomes built in, wired in, and even edited into the molecular being of an American soldier. Lurking in the background and dark recesses of all US military enhancement research, Bickford demonstrates, is the desire to preserve US military and imperial power.
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Chemical Lands
Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945
David D. Vail
University of Alabama Press, 2018
An exploration of the elaborate relationship between farmers, aerial sprayers, agriculturalists, crop pests, chemicals, and the environment.

The controversies in the 1960s and 1970s that swirled around indiscriminate use of agricultural chemicals—their long-term ecological harm versus food production benefits—were sparked and clarified by biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). This seminal publication challenged long-held assumptions concerning the industrial might of American agriculture while sounding an alarm for the damaging persistence of pesticides, especially chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT, in the larger environment.
 
In Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 David D. Vail shows, however, that a distinctly regional view of agricultural health evolved. His analysis reveals a particularly strong ethic in the North American grasslands where practitioners sought to understand and deploy insecticides and herbicides by designing local scientific experiments, engineering more precise aircraft sprayers, developing more narrowly specific chemicals, and planting targeted test crops. Their efforts to link the science of toxicology with environmental health reveal how the practitioners of pesticides evaluated potential hazards in the agricultural landscape while recognizing the production benefits of controlled spraying. 
 
Chemical Lands adds to a growing list of books on toxins in the American landscape. This study provides a unique Grasslands perspective of the Ag pilots, weed scientists, and farmers who struggled to navigate novel technologies for spray planes and in the development of new herbicides/insecticides while striving to manage and mitigate threats to human health and the environment.
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Cherokee Women In Crisis
Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838-1907
Carolyn Johnston
University of Alabama Press, 2003
Explains how traditional Cherokee women’s roles were destabilized, modified, recovered, and in some ways strengthened during three periods of great turmoil

American Indian women have traditionally played vital roles in social hierarchies at the family, clan, and tribal levels. In the Cherokee Nation, specifically, women and men are considered equal contributors to the culture. With this study, however, we learn that three key historical events in the 19th and early 20th centuries—removal, the Civil War, and allotment of their lands—forced a radical renegotiation of gender roles and relations in Cherokee society.

Carolyn Johnston (who is related to John Ross, principal chief of the Nation) looks at how Cherokee women navigated these crises in ways that allowed them to retain their traditional assumptions, ceremonies, and beliefs and to thereby preserve their culture. In the process, they both lost and retained power. The author sees a poignant irony in the fact that Europeans who encountered Native societies in which women had significant power attempted to transform them into patriarchal ones and that American women struggled for hundreds of years to achieve the kind of equality that Cherokee women had enjoyed for more than a millennium.

Johnston examines the different aspects of Cherokee women’s power: authority in the family unit and the community, economic independence, personal autonomy, political clout, and spirituality. Weaving a great-grandmother theme throughout the narrative, she begins with the protest of Cherokee women against removal and concludes with the recovery of the mother town of Kituwah and the elections of Wilma Mankiller and Joyce Dugan as principal chiefs of the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokees.
 
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The Cherokees of Tuckaleechee Cove
Jon Marcoux
University of Michigan Press, 2012
This volume explores culture change and persistence within a late seventeenth-century Cherokee community in eastern Tennessee.
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Cherry Grove, Fire Island
Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town
Esther Newton
Duke University Press, 2014
First published in 1993, the award-winning Cherry Grove, Fire Island tells the story of the extraordinary gay and lesbian resort community near New York City. This new paperback edition includes a new preface by the author.
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Chester Bowles
New Dealer in Cold War
Howard B. Schaffer
Harvard University Press, 1993

When Harry Truman named him ambassador to India in 1951, Chester Bowles was already a prominent figure in American public life a onetime advertising mogul, wartime administrator, governor of Connecticut and yet his past hardly presaged the turn his path would take in Asia. Over the next two decades, at home and abroad, Bowles would become one of the leading liberal lights in American foreign policy, a New Dealer destined to be at odds with the stiffening cold war conservatism of his time. His biography is also the story of America finding its place in a changing world, a story of remarkable relevance to our own post-cold war era.

Howard Schaffer, a former ambassador and seasoned Foreign Service officer, worked closely with Bowles in India and Washington and is able to offer a colorful firsthand portrayal of the man, as well as an insider's view of American foreign policy in the making. Bowles's indefatigable energy, inspired idealism, and humanitarian instincts leave their mark on these pages—as do his stubbornness, his cultural blinders, and his failure to master the game of bureaucratic politics. We see him in his sometimes exhilarating and ultimately frustrating struggle to influence the leaders and policymakers of his day—as twice ambassador to India, Democratic party foreign policy spokesman, congressman from Connecticut, foreign policy adviser to John F. Kennedy, undersecretary to Dean Rusk at the State Department, and President Kennedy's special adviser on Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Drawing on a wealth of documents and interviews with some of the nation's top foreign policy makers in the post-World War II years, Schaffer shows us Bowles in his tireless attempt to advance an alternative approach to international relations during those decades, an approach defined less in military than in economic terms, focused less on the struggle for power with the Soviet Union in Europe than on the contest with China over the fate of Third World countries.

“Only the historians can determine who was right and who was wrong,” Dean Rusk once said of Bowles's ideas and convictions—and today history itself is writing the last word.

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Chewing Gum, Candy Bars, and Beer
The Army PX in World War II
James J. Cooke
University of Missouri Press, 2009
Veterans of World War II have long sung the praises of the PX—a little piece of home in far-flung corners of the world. Though many books on that war tell of combat operations and logistics in detail, this is the first to tell the full story of the Army Exchange System.

The AES was dedicated to providing soldiers with some of the comforts they had enjoyed in civilian life—candy, beer, cigarettes, razor blades, soap—whether by operating an exchange close to where they were fighting or by sending goods forward to the lines, free of charge. The beer may have been only “3.2,” but it was cheap and, unlike British beer, was served cold, thanks to PX coolers. And a constant supply of cigarettes and chewing gum gave GIs an advantage when flirting with the local girls.

In chronicling the history of the AES, James J. Cooke harks back to the Civil War, in which sutlers sold basic items to the Yankee troops for exorbitant prices, and to the First World War, when morale-building provisions were brought in by agencies such as the Red Cross. He then traces the evolution of the PX through World War II from the point of view of those who ran the service and that of the soldiers who used it, blending administrative history with colorful anecdotes and interspersing letters from GIs.

Cooke views the PX as a manifestation of American mobility, materialism, and the cultural revolution of mass consumerism that flourished in the 1920s, serving soldiers who were themselves products of this new American way of retail and expected a high level of material support in time of war. He emphasizes the accomplishments of Major General Joseph W. Byron, chief PX officer from 1941 to 1943, and his deputy, Colonel Frank Kerr. He also tells how the PX dealt with the presence of large numbers of women in uniform and the need to meet their demands in exchange offerings.

By 1945, General Byron could boast that the Army Exchange Service operated the world’s largest department store chain, serving the grandest army the United States had ever put in the field, and today the PX is still a central factor of military life. Yet as Cooke shows, the key to the AES’s importance was ultimately the way it bolstered morale—and helped give our fighting men the will to keep fighting.
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Chi Town
Norbert Blei
Northwestern University Press, 2003
The final work of the acclaimed Chicago Trilogy, this collection of nonfiction tales reveals Sandburg's "city of the big shoulders," concrete and neon; uptown and downtown; State Street, Michigan Avenue; the river, the lake; the matter-of-factness and poetry of Chicago people-from Mike Royko describing his neighborhood to the observations of newspaper vendors, from Studs Terkel interviewing jazz great Dave Brubeck to dinner with Petros in Greek Town. Written with a keen eye, Blei's stories evoke a vanished Chicago, a city of gritty and colorful neighborhoods and their gritty and colorful characters. It is, as he writes, a "love letter to a city that has meant so much to me."

Chi Townis the story of Norbert Blei's love affair with a city that shaped both his life and work. Along the route of this walking tour of the Windy City, you'll dine with Petros in Greek Town, see Studs Terkel in action at WFMT interviewing Dave Brubeck, listen to Mike Royko describe his own neighborhood, share the thoughts of Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, and meet newspaper vendors, trash collectors, bankers and more.
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Chiang Yee
The Silent Traveller from the East--A Cultural Biography
Zheng, Da
Rutgers University Press, 2010
A young man arrives in England in the 1930s, knowing few words of the English language. Yet, two years later he writes a successful English book on Chinese art, and within the following decade publishes more than a dozen others. This is the true story of Chiang Yee, a renowned writer, artist, and worldwide traveler, best known for the Silent Traveller series--stories of England, the United States, Ireland, France, Japan, and Australia--all written in his humorous, delightfully refreshing, and enlightening literary style.

This biography is more than a recounting of extraordinary accomplishments. It also embraces the transatlantic life experience of Yee who traveled from China to England and then on to the United States, where he taught at Columbia University, to his return to China in 1975, after a forty-two year absence. Interwoven is the history of the communist revolution in China; the battle to save England during World War II; the United States during the McCarthy red scare era; and, eventually, thawing Sino-American relations in the 1970s. Da Zheng uncovers Yee's encounters with racial exclusion and immigration laws, displacement, exile, and the pain and losses he endured hidden behind a popular public image.

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Chic Ironic Bitterness
R. Jay Magill, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2009

A brilliant and timely reflection on irony in contemporary American culture

“This book is a powerful and persuasive defense of sophisticated irony and subtle humor that contributes to the possibility of a genuine civic trust and democratic life. R. Jay Magill deserves our congratulations for a superb job!”

—Cornel West, University Professor, Princeton University

“A well-written, well-argued assessment of the importance of irony in contemporary American social life, along with the nature of recent misguided attacks and, happily, a deep conviction that irony is too important in our lives to succumb. The book reflects wide reading, varied experience, and real analytical prowess.”

—Peter Stearns, Provost, George Mason University

“Somehow, Americans—a pragmatic and colloquial lot, for the most part—are now supposed to speak the Word, without ironic embellishment, in order to rebuild the civic culture. So irony’s critics decide it has become ‘worthy of moral condemnation.’ Magill pushes back against this new conventional wisdom, eloquently defending a much livelier American sensibility than the many apologists for a somber ‘civic culture’ could ever acknowledge."

—William Chaloupka, Chair and Professor, Department of Political Science, Colorado State University

The events of 9/11 had many pundits on the left and right scrambling to declare an end to the Age of Irony. But six years on, we're as ironic as ever. From The Simpsons and Borat to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the ironic worldview measures out a certain cosmopolitan distance, keeping hypocrisy and threats to personal integrity at bay.

Chic Ironic Bitterness is a defense of this detachment, an attitude that helps us preserve values such as authenticity, sincerity, and seriousness that might otherwise be lost in a world filled with spin, marketing, and jargon. And it is an effective counterweight to the prevailing conservative view that irony is the first step toward cynicism and the breakdown of Western culture.

R. Jay Magill, Jr., is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in American Prospect, American Interest, Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Policy, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Print, amongother periodicals and books. A former Harvard Teaching Fellow and Executive Editor of DoubleTake, he holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hamburg in Germany. This is his first book.

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Chicago 1890
The Skyscraper and the Modern City
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Chicago’s first skyscrapers are famous for projecting the city’s modernity around the world. But what did they mean at home, to the Chicagoans who designed and built them, worked inside their walls, and gazed up at their façades? Answering this multifaceted question, Chicago 1890 reveals that early skyscrapers offered hotly debated solutions to the city’s toughest problems and, in the process, fostered an urban culture that spread across the country.

            An ambitious reinterpretation of the works of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, this volume uses their towering achievements as a lens through which to view late nineteenth-century urban history. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury sheds new light on many of Chicago’s defining events—including violent building trade strikes, the Haymarket bombing, the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Burnham’s Plan of Chicago—by situating the Masonic Temple, the Monadnock Building, and the Reliance Building at the center of the city’s cultural and political crosscurrents.

            While architects and property owners saw these pioneering structures as manifestations of a robust American identity, immigrant laborers and social reformers viewed them as symbols of capitalism’s inequity. Illuminated by rich material from the period’s popular press and professional journals, Merwood-Salisbury’s chronicle of this contentious history reveals that the skyscraper’s vaunted status was never as inevitable as today’s skylines suggest.

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Chicago '68
David Farber
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Entertaining and scrupulously researched, Chicago '68 reconstructs the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago—an epochal moment in American cultural and political history. By drawing on a wide range of sources, Farber tells and retells the story of the protests in three different voices, from the perspectives of the major protagonists—the Yippies, the National Mobilization to End the War, and Mayor Richard J. Daley and his police. He brilliantly recreates all the excitement and drama, the violently charged action and language of this period of crisis, giving life to the whole set of cultural experiences we call "the sixties."

"Chicago '68 was a watershed summer. Chicago '68 is a watershed book. Farber succeeds in presenting a sensitive, fairminded composite portrait that is at once a model of fine narrative history and an example of how one can walk the intellectual tightrope between 'reporting one's findings' and offering judgements about them."—Peter I. Rose, Contemporary Sociology
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Chicago
A Biography
Dominic A. Pacyga
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Chicago has been called by many names. Nelson Algren declared it a “City on the Make.” Carl Sandburg dubbed it the “City of Big Shoulders.” Upton Sinclair christened it “The Jungle,” while New Yorkers, naturally, pronounced it “the Second City.”

At last there is a book for all of us, whatever we choose to call Chicago. In this magisterial biography, historian Dominic Pacyga traces the storied past of his hometown, from the explorations of Joliet and Marquette in 1673 to the new wave of urban pioneers today. The city’s great industrialists, reformers, and politicians—and, indeed, the many not-so-great and downright notorious—animate this book, from Al Capone and Jane Addams to Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Barack Obama. But what distinguishes this book from the many others on the subject is its author’s uncommon ability to illuminate the lives of Chicago’s ordinary people. Raised on the city’s South Side and employed for a time in the stockyards, Pacyga gives voice to the city’s steelyard workers and kill floor operators, and maps the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns.

 Filled with the city’s one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, Chicago: A Biography is as big and boisterous as its namesake—and as ambitious as the men and women who built it.

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Chicago
A Biography
Dominic A. Pacyga
University of Chicago Press, 2009

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book. 

Chicago has been called by many names. Nelson Algren declared it a “City on the Make.” Carl Sandburg dubbed it the “City of Big Shoulders.” Upton Sinclair christened it “The Jungle,” while New Yorkers, naturally, pronounced it “the Second City.”

At last there is a book for all of us, whatever we choose to call Chicago. In this magisterial biography, historian Dominic Pacyga traces the storied past of his hometown, from the explorations of Joliet and Marquette in 1673 to the new wave of urban pioneers today. The city’s great industrialists, reformers, and politicians—and, indeed, the many not-so-great and downright notorious—animate this book, from Al Capone and Jane Addams to Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Barack Obama. But what distinguishes this book from the many others on the subject is its author’s uncommon ability to illuminate the lives of Chicago’s ordinary people. Raised on the city’s South Side and employed for a time in the stockyards, Pacyga gives voice to the city’s steelyard workers and kill floor operators, and maps the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns.

 Filled with the city’s one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, Chicago: A Biography is as big and boisterous as its namesake—and as ambitious as the men and women who built it.

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Chicago
A Geography of the City and Its Region
John C. Hudson
University of Chicago Press, 2006
The geography of Chicago is central to its history and to its success as the nation’s now third largest metropolitan area. The first geography of the Windy City in more than fifty years, Chicago: A Geography of the City and Its Region is a topical and chronological analysis of the area that both considers the city’s historical geography and anticipates its future trends.

Renowned geographer John C. Hudson leaves no aspect unexplored in this ambitious and peerless book. Beginning with an overview of metropolitan Chicago, Hudson describes how the city has served as a model to social scientists and examines its unique neighborhoods and communities from the perspectives of Chicagoans themselves. A thorough description of the physical geography of the region introduces a series of studies in historical geography that consider the origins of the city and its early development through to its present state, paying particular attention to race, ethnicity, and suburbanization, as well as commuting patterns, neighborhood change, and patterns of income distribution. Chicago concludes with a comparison of the balanced geography that prevailed in the early twentieth century with the skewed pattern of sectoral imbalances that exists today.

Supplemented with more than one hundred maps that illustrate the evolution of Chicago over time and sixty-four black-and-white and color photographs that capture iconic images of the city’s landscapes and its people, Chicago beautifully synthesizes the city’s social and economic strata with geographical features to provide an authoritative guide to modern Chicagoland.
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Chicago and Its Botanic Garden
The Chicago Horticultural Society at 125
Cathy Jean Maloney
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Formed in 1890, during the heady days before the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the Chicago Horticultural Society boasted members with names deeply rooted in Chicago history: Buckingham, McCormick, and Palmer, among others. Today, as it leads the Garden in a model public-private partnership with the Forest Preserves of Cook County, the Society’s horticultural practices have exceeded the vision of its founders.

Chicago and Its Botanic Garden: The Chicago Horticultural Society at 125 is a lushly illustrated and thoughtful history of the Society and its evolution from a producer of monumental flower and botanical shows, through a fallow period, to the opening in 1972 of the Chicago Botanic Garden, a living museum and world leader in horticulture, plant science and conservation, education, and urban agriculture. Author Cathy Jean Maloney combines meticulous scholarship with a flair for storytelling in a narrative that will delight everyone from casual strollers of the grounds to the volunteers, professionals, and scientists who compose the influential society.


 
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Chicago and the Old Northwest, 1673-1835
Milo Milton Quaife
University of Illinois Press, 1913
In this sweeping survey, Milo Milton Quaife traces the events leading from Chicago's emergence as a key outpost at the edge of the frontier to its establishment as the crossroads of American commerce.
 
Strategically located at the head of the Great Lakes on the Chicago portage, one of the main highways connecting the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence waterway with the Mississippi River, Chicago was equally valued by explorers, traders, settlers, and governments.

Quaife narrates the opening of trade and the course of European exploration, facilitated by the Chicago portage and subsequent construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. He profiles the personalities who shaped the early Chicago area, from the French explorers La Salle, Marquette, and Joliet to the ambitious Champlain, who set the course for decades to come by securing for New France the enmity of the Iroquois.
 
Quaife provides a full description of the Indian trade, which constituted the basis of commerce in the region for the entire period covered by the book, as well as a blow-by-blow account of how old rivalries and alliances between Indian tribes complicated the English and French plans for divvying up the New World. He also describes the conflicts between natives and whites with sympathy and detail on both sides, depicting Indian attacks on white settlements as rationally motivated acts aiming toward specific goals of strategy or revenge.
 
First published in 1913, Chicago and the Old Northwest, 1673-1835 is one of the earliest works of a man who became one of the premier scholars of his generation. In a new introduction, Chicago historian Perry R. Duis sketches Quaife's long and varied career, his influence on the history profession, and his crusade to prove that a black trader was the first permanent resident of Chicago.
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Chicago Apartments
A Century and Beyond of Lakefront Luxury
Neil Harris and Teri J. Edelstein
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The Chicago lakefront is one of America’s urban wonders. The ribbon of high-rise luxury apartment buildings along the Lake Michigan shore has few, if any, rivals nationwide for sustained architectural significance. This historic confluence of site, money, style, and development lies at the heart of the updated edition of Neil Harris's Chicago Apartments: A Century and Beyond of Lakefront Luxury. The book features more than one hundred buildings, stretching from south to north and across more than a century, each with its own special combination of design choice, floor plans, and background story. Harris, with the assistance of Teri J. Edelstein, proves to be an affable and knowledgeable tour guide, guiding us through dozens of buildings, detailing a host of inimitable development histories, design choices, floor plans, and more along the way. Of particular note are recent structures on the Chicago River and south of the Loop that are proposing new definitions of comfort and extravagance. Featuring nearly 350 stunning images and a foreword by renowned Chicago author Sara Paretsky, this new edition of Chicago Apartments offers a wide-ranging look inside some of the Windy City’s most magnificent abodes.
 
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The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism
Anne Meis Knupfer
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Following on the heels of the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance was a resonant flourishing of African American arts, literature, theater, music, and intellectualism, from 1930 to 1955. Anne Meis Knupfer's The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism demonstrates the complexity of black women's many vital contributions to this unique cultural flowering.

The book examines various groups of black female activists, including writers and actresses, social workers, artists, school teachers, and women's club members to document the impact of social class, gender, nativity, educational attainment, and professional affiliations on their activism. Together, these women worked to sponsor black history and literature, to protest overcrowded schools, and to act as a force for improved South Side housing and employment opportunities. Knupfer also reveals the crucial role these women played in founding and sustaining black cultural institutions, such as the first African American art museum in the country; the first African American library in Chicago; and various African American literary journals and newspapers. As a point of contrast, Knupfer also examines the overlooked activism of working-class and poor women in the Ida B. Wells and Altgeld Gardens housing projects.

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Chicago Blues
Portraits and Stories
David Whiteis
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Through revealing portraits of selected local artists and slice-of-life vignettes drawn from the city’s pubs and lounges, Chicago Blues encapsulates the sound and spirit of the blues as it is lived today. As a committed participant in the Chicago blues scene for more than a quarter century, David Whiteis draws on years of his observations and extensive interviews to paint a full picture of the Chicago blues world, both on and off the stage. 

In addition to portraits of blues artists he has personally known and worked with, Whiteis takes readers on a tour of venues like East of Ryan and the Starlight Lounge, home to artists such as Jumpin’ Willie Cobbs, Willie D., and Harmonica Khan. He tells the stories behind the lives of past pioneers, including Junior Wells, pianist Sunnyland Slim, and harpist Big Walter Horton, whose music reflects the universal concerns with love, loss, and yearning that continue to keep the blues so vital for so many.

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Chicago Business and Industry
From Fur Trade to E-Commerce
Edited by Janice L. Reiff
University of Chicago Press, 2013
From its humble beginnings as a fur-trading outpost, Chicago has become one of the foremost centers of world finance and trade. With its blue-collar work ethic and an economic history that extends into virtually every segment of American industry, it certainly lives up to its moniker as the City That Works.

Drawing on the award-winning Encyclopedia of Chicago, Janice L. Reiff has compiled a unique history of work in the Windy City. Beginning with an overview of the city’s commercial development, Chicago Business and Industry considers how key industries shaped—and were shaped by—both the local and global economies. The city’s phenomenal population growth, its proximity to water, and its development of railroads made Chicago one of the most productive markets for lumber and grain throughout the nineteenth century. The region’s once-booming steel industry, on the other hand, suffered a dramatic decline in the second half of the twentieth century, when already weakened demand met with increasing international competition. Chicago Business and Industry chronicles the Chicago region’s changing fortunes from its beginning.

Reiff has compiled and updated essays from the Encyclopedia covering the city’s most historically famous—and infamous—companies, from the Union Stock Yard to Montgomery Ward to the Board of Trade. The book concludes with a historical account of labor types and issues in the city, with attention to such topics as health-care workers, unemployment, and unionization. Today, Groupon and a host of other high-tech firms have led some experts to christen Chicago the Silicon Valley of the Midwest. Reiff’s new introduction takes account of these and other recent trends.

Engaging, accessible, and packed with fascinating facts, Chicago Business and Industry invites readers into the history and diversity of work in the city, helping them understand how Chicago became Chicago.
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Chicago by Day and Night
The Pleasure Seeker's Guide to the Paris of America
Paul Durica and Bill Savage
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America is an actual guidebook to Chicago for visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. This unauthorized handbook to the rowdy city outside the elegant fairgrounds explores pleasures high and low. The theaters and music, architectural glories, parks and boulevards, churches and synagogues, and other elevated pursuits the authors included in 1893 gave the book a veneer of high culture. But the book owed its popularity to its insider tips about Chicago's lurid and louche entertainments—drink, gambling, and sex. With a wink and tongue firmly in cheek, the original authors condemned Gilded Age vice while offering curious travelers precise directions to the dubious, decadent, and debauched quarters of the Windy City. 

To introduce this compulsively readable, gift-quality journey through the Chicago of 1893, Chicago writers and humorists Paul Durica and Bill Savage have added an expert introduction to Gilded Age Chicago and the World's Columbian Exposition. Showcasing the first Ferris wheel, dazzling new electrification technologies, and exhibits from around the world, the Exposition was Chicago’s chance to prove it had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire and would claim a place among the world’s great cities.

Both a perfect keepsake or gift for Chicago travelers as well as an invaluable text for readers interested in the history of Chicago, the Midwest, or Gilded Age urban life, Chicago by Day and Night is a beloved classic of Chicago writing. 
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Chicago by the Book
101 Publications That Shaped the City and Its Image
Caxton Club
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Despite its rough-and-tumble image, Chicago has long been identified as a city where books take center stage. In fact, a volume by A. J. Liebling gave the Second City its nickname. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle arose from the midwestern capital’s most infamous industry. The great Chicago Fire led to the founding of the Chicago Public Library. The city has fostered writers such as Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago’s literary magazines The Little Review and Poetry introduced the world to Eliot, Hemingway, Joyce, and Pound. The city’s robust commercial printing industry supported a flourishing culture of the book. With this beautifully produced collection, Chicago’s rich literary tradition finally gets its due.

Chicago by the Book profiles 101 landmark publications about Chicago from the past 170 years that have helped define the city and its image. Each title—carefully selected by the Caxton Club, a venerable Chicago bibliophilic organization—is the focus of an illustrated essay by a leading scholar, writer, or bibliophile.

Arranged chronologically to show the history of both the city and its books, the essays can be read in order from Mrs. John H. Kinzie’s 1844 Narrative of the Massacre of Chicago to Sara Paretsky’s 2015 crime novel Brush Back. Or one can dip in and out, savoring reflections on the arts, sports, crime, race relations, urban planning, politics, and even Mrs. O’Leary’s legendary cow. The selections do not shy from the underside of the city, recognizing that its grit and graft have as much a place in the written imagination as soaring odes and boosterism. As Neil Harris observes in his introduction, “Even when Chicagoans celebrate their hearth and home, they do so while acknowledging deep-seated flaws.” At the same time, this collection heartily reminds us all of what makes Chicago, as Norman Mailer called it, the “great American city.”

With essays from, among others, Ira Berkow, Thomas Dyja, Ann Durkin Keating, Alex Kotlowitz, Toni Preckwinkle, Frank Rich, Don Share, Carl Smith, Regina Taylor, Garry Wills, and William Julius Wilson; and featuring works by Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Clarence Darrow, Erik Larson, David Mamet, Studs Terkel, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many more.
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Chicago Católico
Making Catholic Parishes Mexican
Deborah E. Kanter
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Today, over one hundred Chicago-area Catholic churches offer Spanish language mass to congregants. How did the city's Mexican population, contained in just two parishes prior to 1960, come to reshape dozens of parishes and neighborhoods?

Deborah E. Kanter tells the story of neighborhood change and rebirth in Chicago's Mexican American communities. She unveils a vibrant history of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant relations as remembered by laity and clergy, schoolchildren and their female religious teachers, parish athletes and coaches, European American neighbors, and from the immigrant women who organized as guadalupanas and their husbands who took part in the Holy Name Society. Kanter shows how the newly arrived mixed memories of home into learning the ways of Chicago to create new identities. In an ever-evolving city, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans’ fierce devotion to their churches transformed neighborhoods such as Pilsen.

The first-ever study of Mexican-descent Catholicism in the city, Chicago Católico illuminates a previously unexplored facet of the urban past and provides present-day lessons for American communities undergoing ethnic integration and succession.

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Chicago
City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated
Nelson Algren
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren's writing that "you should not read it if you cannot take a punch." The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. This 50th anniversary edition is newly annotated with explanations for everything from slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago."

"This short, crisp, fighting creed is both a social document and a love poem, a script in which a lover explains his city's recurring ruthlessness and latent power; in which an artist recognizes that these are portents not of death, but of life."—New York Herald Tribune

Nelson Algren (1909-1981) won the National Book Award in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm. His other works include Walk on the Wild Side, The Neon Wilderness, and Conversations with Nelson Algren, the last available from the University of Chicago Press. David Schmittgens teaches English at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, Illinois. Bill Savage is a lecturer at Northwestern University and coeditor of the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of The Man with the Golden Arm.
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Chicago
City on the Make: Sixtieth Anniversary Edition
Nelson Algren
University of Chicago Press, 2011

“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that “you should not read it if you cannot take a punch.” The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its “nobodies nobody knows”: the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets.

Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall’s business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city’s breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence.

The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, “the best book about Chicago.”

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The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville's Democracy in America
James T. Schleifer
University of Chicago Press, 2012

One of the greatest books ever to be written on the United States, Democracy in America continues to find new readers who marvel at the lasting insights Alexis de Tocqueville had into our nation and its political culture. The work is, however, as challenging as it is important; its arguments can be complex and subtle, and its sheer length can make it difficult for any reader, especially one coming to it for the first time, to grasp Tocqueville’s meaning. The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” is the first book written expressly to help general readers and students alike get the most out of this seminal work.

Now James T. Schleifer, an expert on Tocqueville, has provided the background and information readers need in order to understand Tocqueville’s masterwork. In clear and engaging prose, Schleifer explains why Democracy in America is so important, how it came to be written, and how different generations of Americans have interpreted it since its publication. He also presents indispensable insight on who Tocqueville was, his trip to America, and what he meant by equality, democracy, and liberty.

Drawing upon his intimate knowledge of Tocqueville’s papers and manuscripts, Schleifer reveals how Tocqueville’s ideas took shape and changed even in the course of writing the book. At the same time, Schleifer provides a detailed glossary of key terms and key passages, all accompanied by generous citations to the relevant pages in the University of Chicago Press Mansfield/Winthrop translation. The Chicago Companion will serve generations of readers as an essential guide to both the man and his work.

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The Chicago Conspiracy Trial
Revised Edition
John Schultz
University of Chicago Press, 2009

In 1969, the Chicago Seven were charged with intent to "incite, organize, promote, and encourage" antiwar riots during the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The defendants included major figures of the antiwar and racial justice movements: Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the madcap founders of the Yippies; Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, longtime antiwar organizers; David Dellinger, a pacifist and chair of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; and Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, who would be bound and gagged in the courtroom before his case was severed from the rest.

The Chicago Conspiracy Trial is an electrifying account of the months-long trial that commanded the attention of a divided nation. John Schultz, on assignment for The Evergreen Review, witnessed the whole trial of the Chicago Seven, from the jury selection to the aftermath of the verdict. In his vivid account, Schultz exposes the raw emotions, surreal testimony, and judicial prejudice that came to define one of the most significant legal events in American history.

In October 2020, Aaron Sorkin's film, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, will bring this iconic trial to the screen. 

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Chicago Death Trap
The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903
Nat Brandt. Introduction by Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, during a sold-out matinee performance, a fire broke out in Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre. In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob’s failed attempt to escape. In Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903, Nat Brandt provides a detailed chronicle of this horrific event to assess not only the titanic tragedy of the fire itself but also the municipal corruption and greed that kindled the flames beforehand and the political cover-ups hidden in the smoke and ash afterwards.

Advertised as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois was Chicago’s most modern playhouse when it opened in the fall of 1903. With the approval of the city’s building department, theater developers Harry J. Powers and William J. Davis opened the theater prematurely to take full advantage of the holiday crowds, ignoring flagrant safety violations in the process.

The aftermath of the fire proved to be a study in the miscarriage of justice. Despite overwhelming evidence that the building had not been completed, that fire safety laws were ignored, and that management had deliberately sealed off exits during the performance, no one was ever convicted or otherwise held accountable for the enormous loss of life.

Lavishly illustrated and featuring an introduction by Chicago historians Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn, Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 is rich with vivid details about this horrific disaster, captivatingly presented in human terms without losing sight of the broader historical context.

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Chicago
From Vision to Metropolis
Whet Moser
Reaktion Books, 2019
Chicago has been called the “most American of cities” and the “great American city.” Not the biggest or the most powerful, nor the richest, prettiest, or best, but the most American. How did it become that? And what does it even mean? At its heart, Chicago is America’s great hub. And in this book, Chicago magazine editor and longtime Chicagoan Whet Moser draws on Chicago’s social, urban, cultural, and often scandalous history to reveal how the city of stinky onions grew into the great American metropolis it is today.

Chicago began as a trading post, which grew into a market for goods from the west, sprouting the still-largest rail hub in America. As people began to trade virtual representations of those goods—futures—the city became a hub of finance and law. And as academics studied the city’s growth and its economy, it became a hub of intellect, where the University of Chicago’s pioneering sociologists shaped how cities at home and abroad understood themselves. Looking inward, Moser explores how Chicago thinks of itself, too, tracing the development of and current changes in its neighborhoods. From Boystown to Chinatown, Edgewater to Englewood, the Ukrainian Village to Little Village, Chicago is famous for them—and infamous for the segregation between them.

With insight sure to enlighten both residents and anyone lucky enough to visit the City of Big Shoulders, Moser offers an informed local’s perspective on everything from Chicago’s enduring paradoxes to tips on its most interesting sights and best eats. An affectionate, beautifully illustrated urban portrait, his book takes us from the very beginnings of Chicago as an idea—a vision in the minds of the region’s first explorers—to the global city it has become.
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Chicago Gardens
The Early History
Cathy Jean Maloney
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Once maligned as a swampy outpost, the fledgling city of Chicago brazenly adopted the motto Urbs in Horto or City in a Garden, in 1837. Chicago Gardens shows how this upstart town earned its sobriquet over the next century, from the first vegetable plots at Fort Dearborn to innovative garden designs at the 1933 World’s Fair.
            Cathy Jean Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and here she reveals the unusual history of Chicago’s first gardens. Challenged by the region’s clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Chicago’s pioneering horticulturalists, Maloney demonstrates, found imaginative uses for hardy prairie plants. This same creative spirit thrived in the city’s local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nation’s produce hub. The vast plains that surrounded Chicago, meanwhile, inspired early landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and O.C. Simonds, to new heights of grandeur.  
            Maloney does not forget the backyard gardeners: immigrants who cultivated treasured seeds and pioneers who planted native wildflowers. Maloney’s vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like “Bouquet Mary,” a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argument–that Chicago’s garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation.      
            With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide descriptions of living legacy gardens for today’s visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world.
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Chicago
Growth of a Metropolis
Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade
University of Chicago Press, 1969
This is the story of Chicago and how it grew. In a little over a century it rose from a mere frontier outpost to become one of the great cities of the world. No single book can possibly encompass the immense scope of this development or convey the endless diversity of the life of Chicago's people. But with the help of the camera it is possible to capture many dimensions of this extraordinary story.

This volume, however, which comprises over 1,000 pictures and 50 maps, tries to do more than show physical development—it attempts to suggest how the city expanded and why it looks the way it does. Because it asks different questions, this book differs markedly from other "pictorial histories" of American cities. Instead of emphasizing society and customs, this volume deals with the physical conditions of life. In place of the conventional interest in "founding fathers" and leading families, it is more concerned with street scenes and ordinary people. Without neglecting downtown, it also reaches into the residential areas and neighborhood shopping centers. Moreover, this volume is concerned with suburbs and "satellite" towns as well as the historic city.

"Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis is an incredible book. Like its subject it is excessive, and nothing succeeds like excess. It is handsomely designed, with a thousand photographs that document the physical growth and the spatial patterns of the city. . . . A dimensionalism comes through that no other city has. Carl Sandburg sang it in his poetry, and the book does more to grasp it . . . than any other book I have seen."—Hugh Newell Jacobson, New Republic
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The Chicago Handbook of University Technology Transfer and Academic Entrepreneurship
Edited by Albert N. Link, Donald S. Siegel, and Mike Wright
University of Chicago Press, 2015
As state support and federal research funding dwindle, universities are increasingly viewing their intellectual property portfolios as lucrative sources of potential revenue.  Nearly all research universities now have a technology transfer office to manage their intellectual property, but many are struggling to navigate this new world of university-industry partnerships. Given the substantial investment in academic research and millions of dollars potentially at stake, identifying best practices in university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship is of paramount importance.

The Chicago Handbook of University Technology Transfer and Academic Entrepreneurship is the first definitive source to synthesize state-of-the-art research in this arena. Edited by three of the foremost experts in the field, the handbook presents evidence from entrepreneurs, administrators, regulators, and professors in numerous disciplines. Together they address the key managerial and policy implications through chapters on how to sustain successful research ventures, ways to stimulate academic entrepreneurship, maintain effective open innovation strategies, and improve the performance of university technology transfer offices.

A broad and ambitious work, the handbook offers comprehensive coverage for universities of all types, allowing them to confidently handle technology commercialization and further cultivate innovation.
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Chicago in Quotations
Compiled by Stuart Shea
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016
Carl Sandburg was an ardent champion of Chicago, famously issuing the challenge: “Show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and strong and cunning.” For pianist Otis Spann, it was the “mother of the blues,” and a beacon to “every good musician who ever left the South.” But the union leader Eugene V. Debs had harsher words for the city, calling it “unfit for human habitation,” and Rudyard Kipling claimed it was “inhabited by savages” and hoped never to see it again.
           
Whether you look upon the city with admiration, disgust, or an incongruous combination of the two, Chicago has captured the imagination of generations of poets, novelists, journalists, and commentators who have visited or called it home. Chicago in Quotations offers a compendium of the most colorful impressions that citizens of—or visitors to—the Second City will appreciate.
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Chicago in the Age of Capital
Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction
John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov
University of Illinois Press, 2015
In this sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, historians John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov boldly trace the evolution of a modern social order. Combining a mastery of historical and political detail with a sophisticated theoretical frame, Jentz and Schneirov examine the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class.
 
Jentz and Schneirov demonstrate how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The city's leading business interests were unable to stabilize their new system without the participation of the new working class, a German and Irish ethnic mix that included radical ideas transplanted from Europe. Jentz and Schneirov examine how debates over slave labor were transformed into debates over free labor as the city's wage-earning working class developed a distinctive culture and politics.
 
The new social movements that arose in this era--labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women's activism--constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and '70s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago's new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, Chicago in the Age of Capital vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.
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Chicago Latina Trailblazers
Testimonios of Political Activism
Edited by Rita D. Hernández, Leticia Villarreal Sosa, Elena R. Gutiérrez
University of Illinois Press, 2024

Mexican American and Puerto Rican women have long taken up the challenge to improve the lives of Chicagoans in the city’s Latino/a/x communities. Rita D. Hernández, Leticia Villarreal Sosa, and Elena R. Gutiérrez present testimonies by Latina leaders who blazed new trails and shaped Latina Chicago history from the 1960s through today.

Taking a do-it-all attitude, these women advanced agendas, built institutions, forged alliances, and created essential resources that Latino/a/x communities lacked. Time and again, they found themselves the first Latina to hold their post or part of the first Latino/a/x institution of its kind. Just as often, early grassroots efforts to address issues affecting themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods grew into larger endeavors. Their experiences ranged from public schools to healthcare to politics to broadcast media, and each woman’s story shows how her work changed countless lives and still reverberates across the entire city.

An eyewitness view of an unknown history, Chicago Latina Trailblazers reveals the vision and passion that fueled a group of women in the vanguard of reform.

Contributors: Ana Castillo, Maria B. Cerda, Carmen Chico, Aracelis Flecha Figueroa, Aida Luz Maisonet Giachello, Mary Gonzales, Ada Nivia López, Emma Lozano, Virginia Martinez, Carmen Mendoza, Elena Mulcahy, Guadalupe Reyes, Luz Maria B. Solis, and Carmen Velasquez

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Chicago Made
Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis
Robert Lewis
University of Chicago Press, 2008
From the lumberyards and meatpacking factories of the Southwest Side to the industrial suburbs that arose near Lake Calumet at the turn of the twentieth century, manufacturing districts shaped Chicago’s character and laid the groundwork for its transformation into a sprawling metropolis. Approaching Chicago’s story as a reflection of America’s industrial history between the Civil War and World War II, Chicago Made explores not only the well-documented workings of centrally located city factories but also the overlooked suburbanization of manufacturing and its profound effect on the metropolitan landscape.
            Robert Lewis documents how manufacturers, attracted to greenfield sites on the city’s outskirts, began to build factory districts there with the help of an intricate network of railroad owners, real estate developers, financiers, and wholesalers. These immense networks of social ties, organizational memberships, and financial relationships were ultimately more consequential, Lewis demonstrates, than any individual achievement. Beyond simply giving Chicago businesses competitive advantages, they transformed the economic geography of the region. Tracing these transformations across seventy-five years, Chicago Made establishes a broad new foundation for our understanding of urban industrial America. 
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The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition
The University of Chicago Press Editorial Staff
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Technologies may change, but the need for clear and accurate communication never goes out of style. That is why for more than one hundred years The Chicago Manual of Style has remained the definitive guide for anyone who works with words.

In the seven years since the previous edition debuted, we have seen an extraordinary evolution in the way we create and share knowledge. This seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style has been prepared with an eye toward how we find, create, and cite information that readers are as likely to access from their pockets as from a bookshelf. It offers updated guidelines on electronic workflows and publication formats, tools for PDF annotation and citation management, web accessibility standards, and effective use of metadata, abstracts, and keywords. It recognizes the needs of those who are self-publishing or following open access or Creative Commons publishing models. The citation chapters reflect the ever-expanding universe of electronic sources—including social media posts and comments, private messages, and app content—and also offer updated guidelines on such issues as DOIs, time stamps, and e-book locators.

Other improvements are independent of technological change. The chapter on grammar and usage includes an expanded glossary of problematic words and phrases and a new section on syntax as well as updated guidance on gender-neutral pronouns and bias-free language. Key sections on punctuation and basic citation style have been reorganized and clarified. To facilitate navigation, headings and paragraph titles have been revised and clarified throughout. And the bibliography has been updated and expanded to include the latest and best resources available.

This edition continues to reflect expert insights gathered from Chicago’s own staff and from an advisory board of publishing experts from across the profession. It also includes suggestions inspired by emails, calls, and even tweets from readers. No matter how much the means of communication change, The Chicago Manual of Style remains the ultimate resource for those who care about getting the details right.
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The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition
The University of Chicago Press Editorial Staff
University of Chicago Press, 2024
The venerable, time-tested guide to style, usage, and grammar—an indispensable reference informing the editorial canon with sound, definitive advice. Now in its 18th edition!  More than 1.75 million copies sold!

Much has happened in the years since the publication of the seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. The world has transformed, and the Manual has risen to meet the moment. The eighteenth edition of this classic guide for writers, editors, and publishers is the most extensive revision in two decades. 

Every chapter has been reexamined with diversity and accessibility in mind, and major changes include updated and expanded coverage of pronoun use and inclusive language, revised guidelines on capitalization, a broader range of examples, new coverage of Indigenous languages, and expanded advice on making publications accessible to people with disabilities. The Manual’s traditional focus on nonfiction has been expanded to include fiction and other creative genres in coverage of topics such as punctuation and dialogue, and the needs of self-published authors receive wider attention.

The citation chapters have been thoroughly reorganized for the benefit of new and experienced users alike, and the key concepts for editing mathematics have been integrated into the chapters where they will be most useful to generalists. Evolving technologies—from open-access publishing models to AI—are covered throughout. And naturally, there are some well-considered updates to familiar rules, including changes intended to align the Manual’s recommendations more closely with real-world usage.

As with every new edition, devotees of the Manual will find much to discover and ponder.
 
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The Chicago Marathon
Andrew Suozzo
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Received the Hal Higdon Journalism Award, recognizing serious journalism about running from the Chicago Area Runners Association (CARA, 2007).

The first book-length study of the city’s great annual contest

In The Chicago Marathon, Andrew Suozzo reveals this citywide ritual as far more than a simple race. Providing a full-spectrum look at the event’s production and participants, Suozzo shows how the elements that comprise the marathon also reflect modern Chicago’s politics, it’s people, and the ways the city engages with the wider world.

The book encompasses all of the forces that come together to make the race the spectacle it has become today. Beginning with a brisk history of the marathon, Suozzo leads readers from its origins in Greek mythology to its modern reality, and also along its rocky road to international prominence.  He investigates the roles of sponsorship, small-business support, and the city’s intervention on behalf of the marathon, as well as the alliances the event has forged with the media and charity fundraisers. He also discusses race management and the grassroots support that ultimately make it possible, with a special perspective on the aid station directors and volunteers. Finally, The Chicago Marathon features numerous interviews with the runners themselves, ranging from world-renowned professional athletes to amateurs with diverse backgrounds and abilities. 

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Chicago
Metropolis of the Mid-Continent, 4th Edition
Irving Cutler. Foreword by James F. Marran
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent provides a comprehensive portrayal of the growth and development of Chicago from the mudhole of the prairie to today’s world-class city. This completely revised fourth edition skillfully weaves together the geography, history, economy, and culture of the city and its suburbs with a special emphasis on the role of the many ethnic and racial groups that comprise the “real Chicago” of its neighborhoods. Cutler demonstrates how the geography of “Chicagoland” and the influx of a diverse population spurred transportation, industrial technology, the economy, and sporadic planning to foster rapid urban growth, which brought both great progress and severe problems.

Through insightful analysis, Cutler also traces the demographic and societal changes to Chicago, critically examining such problems as the environment, education, racial tension, crime, welfare, housing, employment, and transportation. Richly illustrated with nearly three hundred drawings, photos, maps, and tables, the volume includes six appendices with sections dedicated to Chicago facts, population growth and income data, weather and climate, significant dates, and historic sites.

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front cover of Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs
Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs
A Historical Guide
Edited by Ann Durkin Keating
University of Chicago Press, 2008
“Which neighborhood?” It’s one of the first questions you’re asked when you move to Chicago. And the answer you give—be it Bucktown, Bronzeville, or Bridgeport—can give your inquisitor a good idea of who you are, especially in a metropolis with 230 very different neighborhoods and suburbs to choose from.
            Many of us, in fact, know little of the neighborhoods beyond those where we work, play, and live. This is especially true in Chicagoland, a region that spans over 4,400 square miles and is home to more than 9.5 million residents. In Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs, historian Ann Durkin Keating sheds new light on twenty-first-century Chicago by providing a captivating yet compact guide to the Midwest’s largest city. Keating charts Chicago’s evolution with comprehensive, cross-referenced entries on all seventy-seven community areas, along with many suburbs and neighborhoods both extant and long forgotten, from Albany Park to Zion. Thoughtful interpretive essays by urban historians Michael Ebner, Henry Binford, Janice Reiff, Susan Hirsch, and Robert Bruegmann explore how the city’s communities have changed and grown throughout the years, and sixty historic and contemporary photographs and additional maps add depth to each entry.
            From the South Side to the West Side to the North Side, just about every local knows how distinctive Chicago’s neighborhoods are. Few of us, however, know exactly how they came to be. Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs brings the city—its inimitable neighborhoods, industries, and individuals—to life, making it the perfect guidebook for anyone with an interest in Chicago and its history.
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front cover of Chicago Reflected
Chicago Reflected
A Skyline Drawing from the Chicago River
Ryan Chester
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A unique and playful hand-drawn exploration of the Chicago River’s landscape, documented on an eleven-foot-long foldout.
 
In March 2020, architect Ryan Chester began drawing the Chicago River for at least one hour every day. Using only a pen, he moved methodically along a single massive roll of paper. As each chaotic, isolating day of the COVID-19 pandemic passed, he stayed connected with his adopted city by carefully documenting by hand the beautiful intricacies of Chicago’s riverfront architecture, boats, and bridges.
 
As completed, Chester’s two-foot-high, fifty-five-foot-long drawing is a unique vision. In addition to dozens of accurately depicted buildings, Chester included pieces of Chicago’s past, including the Union Station Concourse Building that was demolished in 1969 and the immense SS Eastland, which sank in the river in 1915, killing hundreds of people. Recent architecture is featured as well, including Studio Gang’s St. Regis Chicago tower and the Bank of America Tower by Goettsch Partners.
 
An essay by acclaimed writer Thomas Dyja accompanies the accordion-fold presentation of Chester’s drawing, enhancing this remarkable volume that will delight any fan of Chicago, architecture, or art. Chicago Reflected opens up fresh vistas of the stunning, ever-evolving architectural landscape that can be found only in Chicago.
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front cover of The Chicago River
The Chicago River
A Natural and Unnatural History
Libby Hill
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
In this social and ecological account of the Chicago River, Libby Hill tells the story of how a sluggish waterway emptying into Lake Michigan became central to the creation of Chicago as a major metropolis and transportation hub. 

This widely acclaimed volume weaves the perspectives of science, engineering, commerce, politics, economics, and the natural world into a chronicle of the river from its earliest geologic history through its repeated adaptations to the city that grew up around it. While explaining the river’s role in massive public works, such as drainage and straightening, designed to address the infrastructure needs of a growing population, Hill focuses on the synergy between the river and the people of greater Chicago, whether they be the tribal cultures that occupied the land after glacial retreat, the first European inhabitants, or more recent residents.

In the first edition, Hill brought together years of original research and the contributions of dozens of experts to tell the Chicago River’s story up until 2000. This revised edition features discussions of disinfection, Asian carp, green strategies, the evolution of the Chicago Riverwalk, and the river’s rejuvenation. It also explores how earlier solutions to problems challenge today’s engineers, architects, environmentalists, and public policy agencies as they address contemporary issues. 

Revealing the river to be a microcosm of the uneasy relationship between nature and civilization, The Chicago River offers the tools and knowledge for the city’s residents to be champions on the river’s behalf.
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