Seems you have not registered as a member of localhost.saystem.shop!
You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
City of Lake and Prairie
Known as the Windy City and the Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago has earned a more apt sobriquet—City of Lake and Prairie—with this compelling, innovative, and deeply researched environmental history. Sitting at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, one of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, and on the eastern edge of the tallgrass prairies that fill much of the North American interior, early residents in the land that Chicago now occupies enjoyed natural advantages, economic opportunities, and global connections over centuries, from the Native Americans who first inhabited the region to the urban dwellers who built a metropolis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As one millennium ended and a new one began, these same features sparked a distinctive Midwestern environmentalism aimed at preserving local ecosystems. Drawing on its contributors’ interdisciplinary talents, this volume reveals a rich but often troubled landscape shaped by communities of color, workers, and activists as well as complex human relations with industry, waterways, animals, and disease.
One Minute After Sunrise
Whiting, Indiana Saturday, August 27, 1955 Sunrise, 6:11 a.m. Its 80 degrees in the shade, and most of the citys residents are still trying to sleep off an airless, oppressive night. But inside the plant at Whitings biggest employer (and one of the worlds largest oil refineries), something has gone horribly wrongsomething that threatens to destroy the entire community. The clock changes. 6:12 a.m. This is the story of what happened at One Minute After Sunrise on that cataclysmic day in 1955, spoken in the words of the people who lived through it. Its the story of how, in the passing of a single instant, their lives and their community were changed forever.
The World Is Always Coming to an End
This portrait of Chicago’s South Shore and its people is “a thought-provoking deep dive into a neighborhood that remains in perpetual transition” (Kirkus Reviews). An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day—and unmakes itself, too. It is houses and stores and streets, but it’s also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood? In the late 1960s an...
Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing
Drawing on historic sources as well as present-day interviews, Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing is a story about systemic racism, environmental injustice, and the failure of government. In 2016, 1,100 mainly minority residents of a low-income housing complex in East Chicago, Indiana, received a letter from the city forcibly evicting them from their homes because a high level of lead was found in the soil under their houses. The residents were given two months to move. Many could not find safe housing nearby. The site was designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as a Superfund site because of the large amount of toxic material on it. More than 1,300 similar sites are located througho...
Dreams of Duneland
The towering sand dunes along Lake Michigan not far from Chicago are one of the most unexpected natural features of Indiana. Dreams of Duneland is a beautifully illustrated introduction to the Dunes region, its history, and future prospects. This area of shifting sands is also a place of savanna, wetland, prairie, and forest that is home to a wide diversity of plant and animal species. The preserved area of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore sits by residential communities, businesses, and cultural attractions, evidence of a long history of competition for the land among farmers, fur traders, industrialists, conservationists, and urban and recreational planners. With more than 400 stunning images, the book brings to life the remarkable story of this extraordinary place.
Fighting Hoosiers
Fighting Hoosiers: Indiana in Two World Wars tells the compelling, heartbreaking, and breathtaking stories of some of the hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers who served their country during the First and Second World Wars. Drawn from the rich holdings of the Indiana Magazine of History, a journal of state and midwestern history published since 1905, the collection includes original diaries, letters and memoirs, as well as research essays—all of them focused on Hoosiers in the two world wars. Readers will meet Alex Arch, a Hungarian-born immigrant who was the first American to fire a shot in World War I; Maude Essig, a nurse serving with the American Red Cross in wartime France; Kenneth Baker, a soldier in the Army Signal Corps, who crawled across French fields (sometimes over and around dead bodies) to lay phone lines for military communications; and Bernard Rice, a combat medic who witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. Indiana's brave men and women like these have served with distinction in the armed forces since the earliest days of the Indiana Territory. Fighting Hoosiers offers a compelling glimpse at some of their remarkable stories.
Pullman
Well south of Chicago when it was built in the 1880s, the town of Pullman was designed to be a pleasant home for George Pullman's employees. With a theatre, library, and two shopping "malls" but no taverns, his creation instead taught America about proper management and labor relations. This book is a visual history of Pullman the person, the company, and the town that changed the way America thinks about employer / worker rights and responsibilities.
Muddy Ground
In early North America, carrying watercraft—usually canoes—and supplies across paths connecting one body of water to another was essential in the establishment of both Indigenous and European mobility in the continent's interior. The Chicago portage, a network of overland canoe routes that connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, grew into a crossroads of interaction as Indigenous and European people vied for its control during early contact and colonization. John William Nelson charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago's portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Je...
Hoosiers
The story of this Midwestern state and its people, past and present: “An entertaining and fast read.” ―Indianapolis Star Who are the people called Hoosiers? What are their stories? Two centuries ago, on the Indiana frontier, they were settlers who created a way of life they passed to later generations. They came to value individual freedom and distrusted government, even as they demanded that government remove Indians, sell them land, and bring democracy. Down to the present, Hoosiers have remained wary of government power and have taken care to guard their tax dollars and their personal independence. Yet the people of Indiana have always accommodated change, exchanging log cabins and spinning wheels for railroads, cities, and factories in the nineteenth century, automobiles, suburbs, and foreign investment in the twentieth. The present has brought new issues and challenges, as Indiana’s citizens respond to a rapidly changing world. James H. Madison’s sparkling new history tells the stories of these Hoosiers, offering an invigorating view of one of America’s distinctive states and the long and fascinating journey of its people.
Pullman: The Man, the Company, the Historical Park
George Pullman's legacy lies in the town that bears his name. As one of the first thoroughly planned model industrial communities, it was designed to give the comforts of a permanent home to the employees who built America's most elegant form of overnight railroad travel. But the town was more than just a residential wing of sleeper car manufacturing; its 1894 railroad strike led to the national Labor Day holiday. In the early twentieth century, the Pullman Company became the country's largest employer of African Americans, who then formed the nation's first successful Black labor union. Author Kenneth Schoon revisits Pullman's monumental history and the lessons it continues to provide.
