All Titles

Just beneath the glossy surface of Rockford's rich heritage lies a dark history of tragedy.

The city's troubled and turbulent past left scars that still resonate today. Geraldine Bourbon's final struggle still echoes throughout the farmhouse where her estranged husband pursued her with a pistol from room to room before gently laying her corpse on the bed. The sobs of society darling Carrie Spafford still keep vigil over the family plot of the cemetery where she sowed the heartbreak of her twilight years. From the vengeance of Chief Big Thunder to the Witch of McGregor Road, author Kathi Kresol shares the legends and lore of Rockford's haunted history.

In over 200 images accompanied by an insightful narrative, this collection uncovers the trials and triumphs of migration, ethnic survival, and daily life.

Italians have been a part of the Chicago communitysince the 1850s. The city's Italian immigration ratepeaked in 1914, and many of these new residents settled in neighborhoods on the north, west, and south sides of the Loop and in the industrial suburbs of Chicago. An intriguing visual tour, Italians in Chicago explores the lives of over four generations of the community's residents and experiences.

Relive and discover the remarkable evolution and contribution of Jewish people of Chicago, from the 1840s to present day.

For many years Chicago had the third largest Jewishpopulation of any city in the world. Through the medium of historic photographs, this book captures the remarkable evolution of the Jewish people of Chicago, from their immigrant beginnings in the 1840s to their present-day communities. It is a story of the cultural, religious, economic, and everyday life of Chicago's Jews. These pages bring to life the people, events, neighborhoods, and institutions that helped shape and transform today's Jewish community. The photos and maps, culled from the author's and other collections, paint a vivid and informative picture of Chicago Jewry. In addition to recalling the early immigrant German and later Eastern European Jews, this book delves into Jewish neighborhoods including the West Side, South Side, North Side, suburban communities, and Maxwell Street, a neighborhood which produced such prominent Jews as musician Benny Goodman, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, Admiral Hyman Rickover, community organizer Saul Alinsky, and CBS founder William Paley. Chicago Jews have also made contributions to the city and the nation in the arts,commerce and industry, government service, entertainment, and labor, including seven Nobel prize winners. The images show Jews as peddlers and sweatshop workers as well as successful business entrepreneurs and professionals.

Baseball lives, whether one interprets that as meaning that the country's national pastime is still breathing and well after nearly two centuries or as a reference to the people who work in the "industry."

More than 50 years ago, one young man became employed by the Chicago White Sox and began photographing virtually everybody with whom he worked. His intention was to have pictures of his friends and coworkers for the future. Now, Arcadia Publishing is proud to add Lloyd Rutzky's memories of his "team" experiences to its Images of Modern America series in this volume, a companion to the groundbreaking Wrigley Field's Amazing Vendors, published in 2018.

The Mississippi River Festival began as a partnership promoting regional cooperation in the realm of the performing arts, since expanding into a festival of legendary status.

In 1969, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville initiated a remarkable performing arts series called the Mississippi River Festival. Over 12 summer seasons, between 1969 and 1980, the festival presented 353 events showcasing performers in a variety of musical genres, including classical, chamber, vocal, ragtime, blues, folk, bluegrass, barbershop, country, and rock, as well as dance and theater. During those years, more than one million visitors flocked to the spacious Gyo Obata-designed campus in the countryside near St. Louis. The Mississippi River Festival began as a partnership promoting regional cooperation in the realm of the performing arts. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville invited the St. Louis Symphony to establish residence on campus and to offer a summer season. To host the symphony, the university created an outdoor concert venue within a natural amphitheater by installing a large circus tent, a stage and acoustic shell, and a sophisticated sound system. To appeal to the widest possible audience, the university included contemporary popular musicians in the series. The audacity of the undertaking, the charm of the venue, the popularity of the artists, the excellence of the performances, and the nostalgic memory of warm summer evenings have combined to endow the festival with legendary status among those who attended.

The Village of Burr Ridge is aptly named--and not merely for the bur oaks, nor the limestone ridges as the land nears Flagg Creek.

Before there was Burr Ridge, frontier German, English, French, Scottish, and Native Americans came to these forests. The Plainfield and Joliet trails were early Native American and frontier routes to and from trading posts, and oral histories recount the Potawatomi stopping near what would become County Line Road. The angled routes of Plainfield Road and Historic Route 66 are silent reminders of these past trails and travelers. In 1917, International Harvester Company opened a research facility along County Line and Plainfield Roads to perfect agricultural equipment, namely the iconic Farmall tractor. This inspired the namesake village, Harvester, in 1956, which was renamed Burr Ridge in 1962. The modern Illinois Interstates 55 and 294 intersect near Burr Ridge, spurring growth. Today, the village has the distinction of being one of the wealthiest communities in the United States.

Aurora was the first Illinois city to have electric streetlights, but a dark history has resisted illumination as stubborn as the chilly corner of the old roundhouse repels the summer heat.

Learn why Aurora counts ""City of Cemeteries"" among its nicknames as Diane Ladley, ""America's Ghost Storyteller,"" describes the nineteenth-century doctor suspected of trading bodies between his cancer center and a neighboring graveyard. Other eerie legends and strange stories revealed in this book include the marauding brave brought to justice in the Devil's Cave by his own tribe, the sweet legacy of NFL great Walter Payton and the elephants that saved a circus from a tornado.

An engaging pictorial history of the Slovak community in Chicagoland, documenting their journeys and struggles through rare and vintage images.

The story of Slovak Americans in Chicagoland is a tale of the American dream. In a few short years, emigrants from Slovakia with little to their names came to the United States and succeeded beyond their highest hopes. This fascinating story of ""rags to riches"" has been documented in historical photographs in Images of America: Slovaks of Chicagoland. Many Slovaks came to America with few assets, no more than a sixth-grade education, and no knowledge of the English language. They went to school and became naturalized citizens. Many took menial jobs in stockyards, steel mills, and oil refineries. They saved their money and opened grocery stores, banks, construction firms, and other businesses. Slovaks built beautiful churches, quality schools, and recreational facilities. They raised their families to be proud Americans and incorporated traditions from Slovakia into their daily lives, including the important role of religion.

At the close of the nineteenth century, Chicago offered the world a glimpse of humanity's most breathtaking possibilities and its most jaw-dropping horrors.

Even as the White City emerged from the ashes of the Great Fire, serial killers like H.H. Holmes stalked the sparkling new boulevards and tragic accidents plagued the factories, slums and railroads that powered the churn of industrial innovation. Ship captains spoke to the dead, while undertakers discovered reanimated corpses no longer requiring services. From posh mansions built on massacre grounds to the drowned quarries of a forest preserve, Ursula Bielski follows the dark undercurrents beneath the electric lights of the World's Fair.

Here is the black Chicago family album, of African Americans leaving the violent, racist South and ""goin' to Chicago"" to find the American Dream.

The story of black Chicago is so rich that few know it all. It began long before the city itself. Wells, the Eighth Regiment, Jesse Jackson, Oprah, and much more . . . including a guy named Obama. ""The first white man here was a black man,"" Potowatami natives reportedly said about Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the brown-skinned man recognized as Chicago's first non-Indian settler. It's all here: from the site of DuSable's cabin--now smack-dab in the middle of Chicago's Magnificent Mile--to images of famous and infamous residents like boxers Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, and Joe Louis. Here are leaders and cultural touchstones like Jesse Binga's bank, Robert S. Abbott's Chicago Defender, legendary filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Ida B. Here is the black Chicago family album, of folks who made and never made the headlines, and pictures and stories of kinship and fellowship of African Americans leaving the violent, racist South and ""goin' to Chicago"" to find their piece of the American Dream. Chicago has been called the ""Second City,"" but black Chicago is second to none.

Like the Cheshire Cat, much of Chicago's history fades away while perched in plain sight.

For more than a century, the brick walls of the city served as a ready canvas for advertisements that married artistic experimentation and commercial endeavor. Intrepid painters planted signs for horseshoers and Hamlin's Wizard Oil in places where they would outlast the way of life they represented. Since author Joseph Marlin began documenting the city's advertisements more than thirty years ago, many of them have completely vanished beneath the onslaught of blizzard and bulldozer. From national brands to mom-and-pop shops, his collection offers the last glimpse of a bygone era.

Marriott's Great America first opened in Gurnee, Illinois, on May 29, 1976. Located midway between Chicago and Milwaukee, it was the second of two Marriott Corporation theme parks.

Great America was created to be a place where families could have fun together while gaining an appreciation for United States history. The park's five authentically themed areas based on America's past included the best in family and thrill rides, restaurants, specialty shops, artisans, and games. First-rate live entertainment included Broadway-style musicals, bands, parades, a circus, and the Warner Bros. characters featuring BUGS BUNNY. In 1984, the park became Six Flags Great America when it joined the Six Flags family of theme parks. Since then, the park has continued to innovate and expand. Today, including its 20-acre Hurricane Harbor water park, Six Flags Great America is one of the country's finest theme parks. Since 1976, the park has entertained more than 100 million guests.

For the first time in print, Michael Kleen presents the full story of the Prairie State's dalliance with the dark arts.

Although Illinois saw no dramatic witch trials, witchcraft has been a part of Illinois history and culture from French exploration to the present day. On the Illinois frontier, pioneers pressed silver dimes into musket balls to ward off witches, while farmers dutifully erected fence posts according to phases of the moon. In 1904, the quiet town of Quincy was shocked to learn of Bessie Bement's suicide, after the young woman sought help from a witch doctor to break a hex. In turn-of-the-century Chicago, Lauron William de Laurence's occult publishing house churned out manuals for performing bizarre rituals intended to attract love and exact revenge.