No industry shaped Chicago more decisively than the meatpacking industry, and no book exposed the rapacious, exploitative and vicious character of the meatpacking industry more than Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906).

In this episode, we explore the origins and explosive growth of the meatpacking industry, the brutal working conditions on the bloody killing floors, the emergence of literature about Chicago in the early 1900s, the importance of Lithuanians in Chicago history, the life of Upton Sinclair, his urban realist and naturalist writing style, and his political ideas as seen in The Jungle.

Our expert guests are historian Dr. Dominic Pacyga, co-founder of Chicago's Packingtown Museum, and novelist Dr. Douglas Cowie, creator of the Literature of Chicago Course at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Visit the Packingtown Museum, voted the best small museum in Chicago. More information is available here: https://www.packingtownmuseum.org/

Happy Pride Month!

We celebrate with an episode about Queer Chicago featuring two historians of Queer History, Owen Keehnen and Timothy Stewart-Winter.

Topics include the following:
-The difficulties of accessing Queer history since it was repressed and marginalized for so long
-The recovery and reclamation of Queer history
-Early Gay cultures in the Levy District
-The Society for Human Rights, which was the first Gay rights organization in the US, founded in Chicago by Henry Gerber in 1924
-The influence of the German writer and thinker Magnus Hirschfeld on Gay culture in Chicago
-The special historical role of Chicago as the Midwestern Queer city, which differentiates it from the more well-known Gay cities of New York and San Francisco
-The repeal of anti-sodomy laws by the Illinois in 1961, the first state to do so
-Chicago's Human Rights Ordinance of 1988, which formally protected the Queer community from discrimination
-Black Queer Chicago
-Lesbian Chicago
-The AIDS crisis
-The Belmont Rocks and the AIDS Garden

Check out Owen's Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/owenkeehnen/

In our third episode celebrating Jewish American History Month for the ChicagoHamburg30 Sister-City Anniversary podcast, we turn to the career of Studs Terkel. Studs was the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, a Pultizer-Prize winning author, and a celebrated oral historian. He became the voice of Chicago over his lengthy career as a radio host.

The conversation touches on many themes, including his seminal work, _Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do_ (1974) and _Division Street: America_ (1967).

Our expert guests are Peter T. Alter, Chief Historian at the Chicago History Museum and Director of the Studs Terkel Oral History Center.

Mark Larson is an oral historian and author of Working in the 21st Century: An Oral History of American Work in a Time of Social and Economic Transformation (2024).

You can buy Mark Larson's books here: https://rb.gy/ajivqf

Don't forget to visit the Chicago History Museum's research materials here: https://www.chicagohistory.org/

And you can listen to the Studs Terkel Radio Archive here: https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/

"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".