Urban History Seminars

“Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial”

• Michelle Nickerson of Loyola University Chicago

“Doris E. Saunders: Overlooked and Forgotten Bronzeville Trailblazer and Media Game Changer”

• Ann C. Saunders, artist and public historian

“Disarming Chicago: Gun Control from Black Power to Barack Obama.”

• Joshua Salzmann, associate professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University

“The Chicago Covenants Project: Excavating the Documents of Exclusion.”

• LaDale Winling of Virginia Tech and Maura Fennelly of Northwestern University

“Telling Our Stories: Using Historical Scholarship to Combat Black and Latinx Displacement in Grand Rapids, Michigan.”

• Delia Fernández-Jones, associate professor of history at Michigan State University

“The Happiest Place on Earth? Latinx Organizing against Policing and Displacement in Anaheim and Santa Ana from 1995 to 2012.”

• Carie Rael, assistant professor of history at California State University, Long Beach

“Death, Despondency, and Hysteria in the American City: The All But Forgotten Heat Wave of 1936.”

• Andrew Hurley, professor of history at the University of Missouri–St. Louis

“The Multiracial Promise: Coalition, Mayoral Politics, and the Legacy of Harold Washington.”

• Gordon Mantler, Executive Director, University Writing Program, and Associate Professor of Writing and of History, The George Washington University

“Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win”

• Helen Shiller, former city council woman and author

“Islam on a City Campus”

• Abdul Basith Basheer, PhD student in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Obama Presidency Oral History Project, Chicago Section

• Adam Green, Associate Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, & Indigeneity and History and the College, University of Chicago, Susan Sher, Senior Adviser to the President of the University of Chicago, and former Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, and Tina Tchen, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Impact Officer, Obama Foundation, and former Assistant to President Barack Obama, Chief of Staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, and Executive Director of the White House Council on Women Girls

“Tracking Black Women’s Informal Labor in Chicago’s Municipal and Carceral Archives: A Closer Look at Bronzeville’s Policy Game.”

• Betsy Schlabach, associate professor of history at Lawrence University

“How to Save a Building with a Camera: Architectural Photography and Its Role in the Preservation Movement in London and Chicago, 1960s–2020s.”

• Rebekah Coffman, CHM curator of religion and community history, and Chris Redgrave, Architectural photographer at Historic England

Stagg and Stella: We Interrupt this Marriage for Football Season

• Erin McCarthy, Associate Professor of History in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Department at Columbia College Chicago 

Breaking the Japantown Stereotype: Who Were the Japanese and Japanese Americans in Chicago 1865–1940? 

• Takako Day, independent researcher, and Michael Day, Emeritus Professor of English, Northern Illinois University 

Cincinnati and the Prehistory of US City Planning

• Henry Binford, Professor of History at Northwestern University 

Chicago and New York: Variations on an American Theme

• Thomas Dyja, author  

Hartford Bound: How the City Became a West Indian, Puerto Rican, and African American Gateway

• Fiona Vernal, the University of Connecticut 

Open Land for Whom? Race, Environmentalism, and the Battle Over Chicago’s Washington Park

• Brian McCammack, Lake Forest College

Chicagolandia: A History of Latinx Suburbia

• Antonio Ramirez, Elgin Community College 

Reporting the Loop: Taking the ‘L’ from Newspapering to History-writing

• Patrick T. Reardon, author  

Cultures of Aspiration: African Americans in Chicago, 1929 to 1960  

• Julius L. Jones, CHM curator and PhD candidate at the University of Chicago 

How the Suburbs Were Segregated 

• Paige Glotzer, University of Wisconsin–Madison 

Chicago Lumbermen in the New South: The Philanthropic Legacies of B. F. Ferguson, Francis Beidler, and South Carolina’s Old Growth Hardwood Forests 

• Professor Jessica I. Elfenbein, University of South Carolina  

Chicago Lumbermen in the New South: The Philanthropic Legacies of B. F. Ferguson, Francis Beidler, and South Carolina’s Old Growth Hardwood Forests

• Professor Jessica I. Elfenbein, University of South Carolina

Latinx New York: Work and the Origins of the Modern City

• Pedro A. Regalado, Harvard University 

Uncontrollable Blackness

• Douglas Flowe, Washington University in St. Louis 

Revisioning Historic Preservation: Chicago in the Twenty-First Century

• Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago 

The Elusiveness of History: Responding Again to the Great Chicago Fire

• Carl S. Smith, emeritus professor at Northwestern University 

Chicago Católico: Making/Unmaking Mexican Parishes

• Deborah Kanter, Albion College 

Urban Spaces and Democratic Protest in Postwar Chicago: Historicizing the Street Photography of Art Shay

• Erik S. Gellman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Laboring in Industrial Chicago: Latino Workers in the Age of Manufacturing Flight

• Lilia Fernández, Rutgers University 

A Girl’s Preparation for Life’: How Women Reformed Vocational Education in Progressive-Era Chicago 

• Ruby Oram, Loyola University Chicago 

Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side 

• Lee Bey, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 

You Destroy the Rule of Supply & Demand: Power and Profits in Chicago’s Cattle Market 

• Joshua Specht, Monash University 

Wade-in-Rainbow Beach: Contested Integration along Chicago’s Lakefront, 1960–61 

• James Barrett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Confronting Chicago’s 1919 Race Riot: Remembering in Black and Red 

• D. Bradford Hunt, Newberry Library, and Christopher Robert Reed, Roosevelt University 

The Attica Prison Uprising and Why It Matters Today 

• Heather Thompson, University of Michigan 

Split-levels/Sea-levels Rise: Suburbanization, Racism, and Climate Change in the Postwar Metropolis 

• Robert Gioielli, University of Cincinnati 

The Not-So-Common Life: Lea Demarest Taylor and the Chicago Commons Settlement 

• Alicia Schatteman, Northern Illinois University 

Chicago Foodways: An Ever-Changing Menu 

• Bruce Kraig, Roosevelt University 

Uptown Chicago and the Politics of Cultural Diversity, 1955–81 

• Devin V. Hunter, University of Illinois – Springfield 

Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife 

• Pamela L. Bannos, Northwestern University 

City of Choice: Magnet Schools and Urban Renaissance in Post-Civil Rights Chicago 

• Nicholas Kryczka, University of Chicago 

Protest in Suburbia! The 1965 North Shore Summer Project for Fair Housing 

• Mary Barr, Kentucky State University 

Richard J Daley as Urban Reformer 

• Richard Anderson, Princeton University 

What If Early Chicago Was Not “Preeminently a Man’s City?

• Ann Durkin Keating, North Central College 

Urban Schools, Ethnicity, and the Mobility Ladder 

• Cristina Groeger, Lake Forest College 

Jesse Binga: The Untold Story of Chicago’s First Black Banker 

• Don Hayner, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Chicago Sun-Times 

Making Neoliberal Chicago 

• Morris Vogel, Tenement Museum, NYC 

Amigos for Daley: Richard J. Daley, Mexican Americans, and the Making of the Conservative Colonia 

• Mike Amezcua, University of Notre Dame 

Indigenous Metropolis: Chicago’s Urban Indians 

• Patricia Marroquin Norby, director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library 

Black Metropolis Revisited and Revised 

• Mary Pattillo, professor of sociology and African American studies at Northwestern University 

Reconsidering Jane Addams’s Imagined Neighborhood: Hull-House and the Near West Side 

• Ellen Skerrett and Rima Schultz, independent scholars 

Race and Cultural Geography in Chicago’s Loop 

• Gerald Butters, Aurora University 

Undocumented: Immigrants Crossings between Detroit and Windsor before World War II 

• Ashley Johnson Bavery, Northwestern University