"I am an American, Chicago born—-Chicago, that somber city-—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." -The opening lines of The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

In this episode celebrating Jewish American Heritage Month, Douglas Cowie and Riley Moore (Royal Holloway, U. of London) discuss The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, the most decorated American author, who won three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

Bellow was a 'dreamer,' for he was a Jewish immigrant who entered the United States illegally with his parents as a chid. The Bellows settled in Chicago where Saul was raised. As an undocumented migrant, he could not enlist in the army during World War II despite his desire to join the war effort, and this disappointment influenced much of his writing.

In this show, our expert guests discuss the connections between Bellow's life and the life of Augie March as well as the unique authorial style of Bellow. They also assess the claim that Augie March is the Great American Novel.

Happy Jewish American Heritage Month! In this episode, we explore the rich and complex history of Jewish Chicago, from the 1850s to the present.

Topics include the following:

-the first Jewish settlers and politicians in Chicago
-the influence of German high-culture and Enlightenment philosophy on German Jews in Chicago
-the formation of Jewish regimental companies in the Civil War
-the second wave of Jewish immigrants and the tensions between establishment Jews and the new arrivals
-World War I and the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924
-Prohibition and the rise of the Jewish gangster
-the role of Word War II and the Holocaust in unifying the disparate Jewish communities
-protests against the German American Bund
-the transformation of the suburb of Lawndale into German Jewish "Deutschland"
-further immigration trends from the post-Soviet nations as well as Israel

Throughout, you will learn about famous Jewish Chicagoans, such as Henry Greenebaum, Dankmar Adler, Edward Solomon, Hannah Shapiro, Joseph Schaffner, and Julius Rosenwald.

Our expert guests are Dr. Tobias Brinkmann (Penn State University) and Dr. Joe Kraus (University of Scranton).

In this second episode celebrating Chicago poets for National Poetry Month, Douglas Cowie and Adrienne Brown (University of Chicago) discuss the life and poetry of Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. They talk about her poems that document life in Chicago, "Kitchenette Building," "In the Mecca," "Chicago Picasso," and "The Wall," and unpack the social, economic, racial, cultural, and political history that informs her life and work.

Please see these links for further information about topics mentioned in the episode:

Gwendolyn Brooks and others reading her poetry:

The Library of Congress Audio: https://www.loc.gov/item/85755182/
YouTube: We Real Cool (Short Film produced by the Poetry Foundation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0USvSvhue70
LP (Caedmon Records, 1968): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9XlIR-SzVg

The Wall of Respect (City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs):

https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/wall_of_respect.html

History of The Mecca and IIT (Segregation by Design):

https://www.segregationbydesign.com/chicago/iit-and-the-mecca-flats

Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's
Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

-Carl Sandburg, Chicago

Happy National Poetry Month! We will celebrate poetry by featuring two episodes about two giants of Chicago poetry: Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks.

In our first episode, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Professor Michael Coyle (Colgate University), discuss Carl Sandburg's 1919 collection, Chicago Poems.

The panel discusses the origins of Chicago's Poetry Magazine, which is the oldest English-language publication devoted to poetry. They also contrast Sandburg's popular, everyman style with the literary elitism of Modernist poets, such Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Sandburg's poetry is now in the public domain. You can find his work at many sites, including http://www.esp.org/books/sandburg/chicago/chicago-poems.pdf

Our Women's History Month Literature of Chicago episode features a classic novel about a Latina girl coming of age in Chicago by a Latina Chicagoan:The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Host Douglas Cowie and his guest, poet and teacher Alina Borger, begin by exploring why the novel makes for useful study on a high school curriculum. They then embark on a wide-ranging discussion about the novel's structure, its status as a Chicago novel, and the many themes that emerge from its core narrative as a story about a Latina girl's tentative steps towards adolescence.

In the second of our two-episode series about Jane Addams, we continue telling the story of Hull House and Addams' impact on the development of the the city of Chicago. Addams was a keen advocate for worker's rights and helped mediate the labor unrest that had been shaking the city since the Haymarket Affair of 1886. We survey the long list of projects she supported from juvenile justice reform to children's music education and from housing reform to the building of playgrounds and libraries. We also meet her partners in her projects, including Ellen Gates Starr, Eleanor Sophia Smith, John Dewey, Lillian Wald, and Johnny the Greek.

The models of community improvement she created in Chicago began to spread around the US and the world as Addams herself began to set her sights on international issues, namely imperialism, militarization, and war. Her concerns about armed conflict led her to become Chair of the Woman's Peace Party and President of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. We also outline the criticism she endured as a result of her peace activism.

As her health began to fade, she maintained her interest in issues of racial justice and community involvement at Hull House.

In the first of our two episodes on the life of Jane Addams, we learn about her formative years in a small farming village outside of Chicago, her education, and her relationship with her progressive Republican father, from whom she developed some guiding principles for her life, namely the ideas of Christian stewardship and community engagement.

We also learn about her first visits to Europe, where she began to develop her conviction that human beings are not helpless and subject to the unfathomable forces of history, but that we have agency and can change the world in positive ways.

Lastly, we explore the origins of her belief in mediation and dialogue, the idea that we can never solve the problems facing society without understanding one another and speaking to one another.

All of these ideas coalesced with the founding of the first settlement house in Chicago by Addams in 1889, Hull House, a place where immigrants and Americans, rich and poor, black and white, young and old, men and women could come together in order to address the problems facing the fastest-growing city on the planet.

Our two expert guests are Rima Lunin Schultz and Ann Durkin Keating.

Rima is a Jane Addams scholar.  She co-edited "Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary” and most recently co-authored "Eleanor Smith's Hull-House Songs: Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams Chicago".   

Ann is professor of history at North Central College in Naperville, IL, and the co-editor of the "Encyclopedia of Chicago".

In this episode, Dominic Pacyga (Emeritus Professor of History, Columbia College Chicago) and Tobias Brinkmann (Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History, Penn State) discuss the immigration of Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians and Lithuanians to Chicago via the Hamburg-America Line.

Topics include the following:
-the first Eastern European immigrants in the 1850s
-the self-definition of these groups through language, religion, and ethnicity
-the concept of spatial integration and social segregation in Chicago
-the role of railroads in opening up Eastern Europe to the port of Hamburg
-the turmoil in Europe that caused different waves of immigration
-the importance of foreign-language, ethnic newspapers in Chicago
-the new roles available to immigrant women in Chicago
-the inter-ethnic conflict in Chicago caused by World War I
-the effect of immigration restrictions on Eastern Europeans due to the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924
-the inter-ethnic conflict between German Chicagoans (the German-American Bund) and other groups before and during World War II
-the softening of immigration restrictions after WWII with the Displaced Persons Act of 1948
-the differences among Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian experiences during the Cold War

If you are interested in learning more about Polish Chicago, check out Back Home: Polish Chicago at the Chicago History Museum through June 8, 2024. https://www.chicagohistory.org/

And visit the Packingtown Museum to learn more about the role of the stockyards in the immigrant experience. https://www.packingtownmuseum.org/

In honor of Black History Month, Douglas Cowie and his guest, award-winning novelist Ryan Gattis, discuss a classic novel about Black Chicago, Richard Wright's Native Son.

Published in 1940, the novel follows the life of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man living on the South Side of Chicago, who murders a white woman and is thrown into the criminal legal system. The novel's themes include segregation, racism, and economic inequality in the city of Chicago.

February is African-American History Month, and we celebrate the occasion with an episode about Black Chicago with award-winning scholar Dr. Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at Northwestern University.

Topics include the difficulties in defining Black Chicago, which is neither a static nor homogenous concept; the two waves of the Great Migration of Black people from the rural South to the cities of the North in the early 1900s; the important differences between the concepts of the Black Ghetto and the Black Metropolis; and the history of important Black political figures in Chicago from Ida B. Wells and President Barack Obama to Mayors Harold Washington, Lori Lightfoot, and Brandon Johnson. Throughout, Pattillo highlights the resilience and complexity of Black Chicago.