Edward Bates (1793–1869), a founding father of Missouri and leader of the Missouri Whig Party, served as Abraham Lincoln’s attorney general during the American Civil War. In this first full biography of Bates in nearly sixty years, author Mark Neels’s scholarship joins a lively discourse over political ideology throughout American history.
The book covers the dramatic final five months of the war and Lincoln’s role in it. It highlights his final message to Congress in December 1864, passage of the 13th Amendment, his Second Inaugural, his16 days at the front before Appomattox, his unprecedented visit to Richmond after it fell, and the end of the war.
A literary discovery of considerable magnitude, these 98 previously unpublished poems by John Dewey, written principally in the 1910–18 period, illuminate an emotive aspect in his intellectual...
Black Americans in Mourning chronicles the grief felt by African Americans after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The book features prominent men and women, such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, as well as the hard-to-find voices of lesser-known Black people. The collective mourning of Black Americans set the stage for Lincoln's glorification.
This comprehensive and engaging narrative explores the Civil War ordeals and triumphs of the “Lead Mine men,” the 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, who hailed from eleven counties in northern Illinois. Thomas B. Mack uncovers the history on this unit of resilient midwesterners and how they brought hard-war to the Confederacy in 1862.
John J. Bird and Black Politics in Post-Civil War Illinois
by Wayne T. Pitard
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
This first biography of the extraordinary John J. Bird (1844-1912) tells the long-forgotten story of one of the most significant Black politicians in Illinois during the post-Civil War Era.
During the 1860 and 1864 presidential campaigns, Abraham Lincoln was the subject of over twenty campaign biographies. In this innovative study, Thomas A. Horrocks examines the role that these publications played in shaping an image of Lincoln that would resonate with voters and explores the vision of Lincoln that the biographies crafted, the changes in this vision over the course of four years, and the impact of these works on the outcome of the elections.
As the first book to document the experiences of Puerto Ricans in the state of Illinois, this inviting book maps the pedacito de patria (little piece of home) that many Puerto Ricans have carved from the bitter hardships faced in Illinois.
The Life Experiences of Boston’s Founding Street Gang Members
by Paul F. Joyce
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Through interviews, analysis, and life-course theory, retired Boston police officer and criminologist Paul F. Joyce uncovers the long-term impact of gang membership and explores which intervention methods can make a difference in the lives of current gang members.
Stewardship Meets Innovation in a Landmark Village
by Cathy Jean Maloney
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Olmsted's Riverside tells the story of the oasis of Riverside, Illinois, a Chicago suburb planned by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1869. The book describes the village's inception and details in four chronological chapters how Riverside adapted to tragedies and changes in public works technology and environmental thought.
Offering a glimpse into a world largely misunderstood by mainstream society, this book documents the period of eight years that Jane Flynn practiced with Mennonites in two different Southern Illinois communities: Stonefort, and Mount Pleasant in Anna. The imagery explores the Mennonites’ labors, leisure, and faith by documenting their homes, places of work and worship, and the Illinois Ozark landscape they inhabit.
Beulah Annan, Maurine Watkins, and the Trial That Became Chicago
by Charles H. Cosgrove
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
They Both Reached for the Gun sheds new light on the sordid story of the 1924 shooting of Harry Kalsted, Beulah Annan's trial, the participants, and reporter Maurine Watkins’s 1926 play Chicago, which was later adapted to the Rob Marshall movie Chicago, one of most successful movie musicals of all time.
Urban Renewal and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Lincoln Park
by Brian Mullgardt
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago began peacefully but quickly turned into what was later termed a “police riot.” Brian Mullgardt’s investigation of this event and the preceding tensions charts a complex social history that brings together Chicago history, the 1960s, and urbanization, focusing not on the national leaders, but on the grassroots activists of the time.
Pulling off the Sheets tells the previously obscured history of the Second Ku Klux Klan which formed in deep southern Illinois in the early 1920s. This important historical account sets out to expose the lasting impact of the Klan on race relations today.
Through compelling personal accounts and family correspondence, One Step Ahead documents Alfred Feldman’s harrowing flight into exile as he and his family fled the pogroms that flooded across Nazi-occupied Europe. It is a memoir of horror and hope recounted by a man who survived the organized terror of Hitler’s "Final Solution" as it destroyed entire generations of European Jewish life within ten catastrophic years in the mid-twentieth century. Feldman’s memoir conveys the searing pain that has never left him, while demonstrating the triumphant humanity of a survivor.
Edited by Roddrick Colvin, Angela Dwyer and Sulaimon Giwa
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
In this edited volume contributors from around the world ponder the complicated relationships between LGBTQ+ communities and police and law enforcement using intersectional analysis of innovative topics, contemporary issues, and individual experiences.
