Since the city’s founding in 1833, Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods, people, music, and food have captured the attention of a worldwide audience. Celebrated for its gritty, unapologetic, and relentless “can do” spirit, the city has asserted an outsized influence on the development of modern American culture. Chicago gave rise to the skyscraper. It sharpened the political appetites of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. It transformed jazz from a southern musical style into a major international music movement. It defied Prohibition efforts, thanks to mobster-run distilleries and speakeasies. It gave life to Derek Rose and his famous knees. This series invites projects that spotlight the spirit of Chicago and its people in an engaging, widely accessible, and historically accurate manner. These alternative, underground, and yet-to be chronicled stories will reveal the connective tissues that make up the real Chicago.
Series editor: Harvey Young
Edited by David Schaafsma, Lauren DeJulio Bell and Roxanne Pilat
Contributions by Samira Ahmed, Dhana-Marie Branton, Anne Calcagno, Ana Castillo, Maxine Chernoff, Shelly M. Conner, Stuart Dybek, Saja Elshareif, Emil Ferris, Jessie Ann Foley, Charles Johnson, Rebecca Makkai, Daiva Markelis, James McManus, David Mura, Nnedi Okorafor, Christian Picciolini, Tony Romano, Erika Sánchez, George Saunders and Luis Alberto Urrea
Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea
Growing Up Chicago is a collection of coming-of-age stories written by Chicagoland authors that reflects the diversity of the city and its metropolitan area. Primarily memoir, the book asks, What characterizes a Chicago author?
Penned by a former editor in chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, Binga is the definitive biography of the first black banker in Chicago as well as a history of race, politics, and finance in early twentieth-century Chicago.
Southern Exposure is the definitive guide to the often overlooked architectural riches of Chicago’s South Side by architecture expert and former Chicago Sun-Times architecture writer Lee Bey.
This volume brings together a wide range of Chicago theater companies to share strategies for cocreating work as an ensemble. Both handbook and history, Ensemble-Made Chicago includes background on each company, detailed instructions for executing performance and writing exercises, and an overview of the politics shaping the development of ensemble-created work in Chicago.
Penned by award-winning Chicago journalist Bryan Smith, The Breakaway tells the remarkable story of how Rocky Wirtz, scion of a Chicago business and sports dynasty, defied his family and skeptics to take the Chicago Blackhawks from “worst to first.”
Contributions by Andrew Barber, Mariame Kaba, Malcolm London, Aneko Jackson, Nile Lansana, Demetrius Amparan, Page May, Fatimah Asghar, Jacqui Germain, Patricia Frazier, Tim Henderson, Kara Jackson, Alfonzo Kahlil, Krista Franklin, Naudia Williams, Jamila Woods, Sara Geiger, Sammy Ortega, Melinda Hernandez, Jose Olivarez, Natalie Richardson, Michael Cuaresma, Claire DeRosa, Raymesha Henry, Anton Charles Sanders, Breanna Bonslater, Jake Krez, Demetrius Amparan, Tara C. Mahadevan, Marwin Williams, Nate Marshall, Marvin Tate, KZ, Jalen Kobayashi, E'mon Lauren, Leah Love, Miguel Aguilar, Matthew Wilbourn, Idris Goodwin, Sarah McKee, Grace Jones, Jahnari Pruitt, Sarah Macareag, Yana Kunichoff, Haki R. Madhubuti, Gellila Asmamaw, Regina Berg and Britteney Kapri
An anthology of poetry, lyrics, artwork, and essays from Chicago youth that explores the origins and meanings of the name “Chiraq.”
Local Flavor explores iconic restaurants in eight Chicago neighborhoods, telling their little-known stories and tracing how local cuisine shaped the cultural history of the area.
by Abdul Alkalimat, Rebecca Zorach and Romi Crawford
With vivid images and words, The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago tells the story of the mural on Chicago’s South Side whose creation and evolution was at the heart of the Black Arts Movement in the United States.
The Tunnel under the Lake tells the story of the one of the great engineering feats of the nineteenth century. A two-mile tunnel dug and bricked by hand thirty-five feet below the floor of Lake Michigan, the Chicago lake tunnel was designed to bring fresh drinking water to a city in dire need. At the time of its opening in March 1867, it was hailed as the "wonder of America and of the world."
Since the city’s founding in 1833, Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods, people, music, and food have captured the attention of a worldwide audience. Celebrated for its gritty, unapologetic, and relentless “can do” spirit, the city has asserted an outsized influence on the development of modern American culture. Chicago gave rise to the skyscraper. It sharpened the political appetites of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. It transformed jazz from a southern musical style into a major international music movement. It defied Prohibition efforts, thanks to mobster-run distilleries and speakeasies. It gave life to Derek Rose and his famous knees. This series invites projects that spotlight the spirit of Chicago and its people in an engaging, widely accessible, and historically accurate manner. These alternative, underground, and yet-to be chronicled stories will reveal the connective tissues that make up the real Chicago.
Series editor: Harvey Young 
