Reviews
Shin-Kickers From History:Celebrate People’s History
The Celebrate People’s History project began in 1998. In the dead of the night, activist Josh MacPhee, aided by a half-dozen co-conspirators, pasted images of Malcolm X on boarded-up storefronts in Chicago’s West Side. Ten minutes after they started, they had attracted a small crowd of neighborhood residents. Some of them helped put up posters.…
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Chicago’s Great Fire
If you’re a person with a taste for history and you live in Chicago, there are some stories that you can’t avoid.* The Columbian Exposition. The rise of the skyscraper. The Hay Market Square riot.** The Chicago Fire. But the thing about stories that you “know” through osmosis is that you often don’t really know…
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Royal Witches
Long before women’s history became a thing, two types of women held a place in the public imagination: queens (or more accurately, princesses) and witches. In Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth Century England, historian Gemma Hollman considers a point at which two subjects of women’s history intersect—the political roles played by royal…
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