One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than 1...

We commonly think of the psychedelic sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in "The Democrat...

Among the great figures of Progressive Era reform, Edith and Grace Abbott are perhaps the least sung. Peers, companions, and coworkers of legendary figures such as Jane Addams and Sophonisba Breckinridge, the Abbott sisters were nearly omnipresent in...

The question of how the American state defines its power has become central to a range of historical topics, from the founding of the Republic and the role of the educational system to the functions of agencies and America's place in the world. Yet c...

Nineteenth-century America saw numerous campaigns against masturbation, which was said to cause illness, insanity, and even death".Riotous Flesh" explores women's leadership of those movements, with a specific focus on their rhetorical, social, and p...

Our traditional image of Chicago – as a gritty metropolis carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics overshadows its ends – is such a powerful shaper of the city's identity that many of its closest observers fail to no...

The founding articles of the University of Chicago contained what was for the era a shocking declaration: "To provide, impart, and furnish opportunities for all departments of higher education to persons of both sexes on equal terms". In a time when...

Calvin Schermerhorn's provocative study views the development of modern American capitalism through the window of the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade. This eye-opening history follows money and ships as well as enslaved human beings to demo...

The Royal Descents comprises Volume Three of Dr. Justin Glenn's "The Washingtons: A Family History", a comprehensive multi-volume work covering fifteen generations of the "Presidential Branch" of the Washingtons. This study includes more than 63,000...

The history of slavery in early America is a history of suicide. On ships crossing the Atlantic, enslaved men and women refused to eat or leaped into the ocean. They strangled or hanged themselves. They tore open their own throats. In America, they j...