Events Newsletters Subscribe

Tag: History
A Man with a Gun
By Robert Loerzel
Just in time for the Chicago-filmed movie Public Enemies, out July 1st, here’s a primer on the real life of John Dillinger, according to his biographer Bryan Burrough and other historians Read more
Friends—With Benefits?
By Robert Loerzel
A new documentary establishes Jane Addams and her close friend, Mary Rozet Smith, as gay icons. Does it go too far? Read more
The Gay ’30s
By Lucinda Fleeson
For a brief but wild time in the twenties and thirties, an openly gay culture thrived in Chicago—a period historians call the “Pansy Craze.” Nightclubs and cabarets drew crowds of homosexuals, lesbians, and voyeurs—among them, sociologists who dutifully recorded the proceedings. Recently rediscovered recollections from that era have landed the city in the forefront of the small but popular field of gay historical research. Read more
Heartbreak Hotel
By Charles Lane
Only a few years after J. W. Stevens opened his grand Michigan Avenue hotel, the Depression devastated his family, inducing a series of calamities that included suicide, bankruptcy, and criminal charges. But from the debacle of the Stevens Hotel (now Chicago Hilton and Towers) emerged a young man who today, at 86, sits on the U.S. Supreme Court Read more
Alice Clement: The Detective Wore Pearls
By Bryan Smith
When Chicago was a rowdy city of speakeasies and brothels, gangsters and con men, Alice Clement—police star 3428—ruled as the first female detective. But then, oddly, most traces of her disappeared, until even the police department had all but forgotten. Read more
Heavy
By Robert Kurson
By the time he died at 32 in 1958, Robert Earl Hughes of tiny Fishhook, Illinois, weighed more than 1,000 pounds. Read more