Local historian Margery Blair Perkins (1907-1981) provides a detailed narrative charting the growth and development of the North Shore city of Evanston, Illinois, a place boasting a rich and multi-layered history. Perkins brings the citys past to life through stories of its residents, architecture, and growth over the years. She charts the development of the city from its earliest days when it was known as the settlement of Grosse Pointe and later Ridgeville to its modern manifestation as a bustling city just outside of Chicago. Within a larger historical narrative, Perkins provides biographies of noted residents as she documents the evolution of the citys organizations, cultural life and institutions, such as Northwestern University.

Local historian Margery Blair Perkins (1907-1981) provides a detailed narrative charting the growth and development of the North Shore city of Evanston, Illinois, a place boasting a rich and multi-layered history. Perkins brings the citys past to life through stories of its residents, architecture, and growth over the years. She charts the development of the city from its earliest days when it was known as the settlement of Grosse Pointe and later Ridgeville to its modern manifestation as a bustling city just outside of Chicago. Within a larger historical narrative, Perkins provides biographies of noted residents as she documents the evolution of the citys organizations, cultural life and institutions, such as Northwestern University.

Enjoy a trip through historic Evanston. See how Davis Street and Sherman and Orrington Avenues appeared around the beginning of the 20th century. Learn how Fountain Square has evolved and how the Merrick Rose Garden is connected. See Northwestern University as it was founded, along with early Evanston's lakefront, city hall, library, and post office. Many of the buildings shown in this book are still standing, while others have been demolished. In some postcard views the stately elm trees of later decades are seen as saplings. The Library Plaza Hotel, North Shore Hotel, and Georgian Hotel are here as well, along with the historic schools, churches, train depots, and, of course, Grosse Point Lighthouse, which all helped shape the city in its formative years.

In 1834 the weary missionary Jason Lee arrived on the banks of the Willamette River and began to build a mission to convert the local Kalapuya and Chinook populations to the Methodist Church. The denomination had become a religious juggernaut in the United States, dominating the religious scene throughout the mid-Atlantic and East Coast. But despite its power and prestige and legions of clergy and congregants, Methodism fell short of its goals of religious supremacy in the northwest corner of the continent. In A Country Strange and Far Michael C. McKenzie considers how and why the Methodist Church failed in the Pacific Northwest and how place can affect religious transplantation and growth. Methodists failed to convert local Native people in large numbers, and immigrants who moved into the rural areas and cities of the Northwest wanted little to do with Methodism. McKenzie analyzes these failures, arguing the region itself--both the natural geography of the place and the immigrants' and clergy's responses to it--was a primary reason for the church's inability to develop a strong following there. The Methodists' efforts in the Pacific Northwest provide an ideal case study for McKenzie's timely region-based look at religion.

City of Big Shoulders links key events in Chicago's development, from its marshy origins in the 1600s to today's robust metropolis. Robert G. Spinney presents Chicago in terms of the people whose lives made the city—from the tycoons and the politicians to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world. In this revised and updated second edition that brings Chicago's story into the twenty-first century, Spinney sweeps his historian's gaze across the colorful and dramatic panorama of the city's explosive past. How did the pungent swamplands that the Native Americans called "the wild-garlic place" burgeon into one of the world's largest and most sophisticated cities? What is the real story behind the Great Chicago Fire? What aspects of American industry exploded with the bomb in Haymarket Square? Could the gritty blue-collar hometown of Al Capone become a visionary global city? A city of immigrants and entrepreneurs, Chicago is quintessentially American. Spinney brings it to life and highlights the key people, moments, and special places—from Fort Dearborn to Cabrini-Green, Marquette to Mayor Daley, the Union Stock Yards to the Chicago Bulls—that make this incredible city one of the best places in the world.

In 1974, middle-schooler Mary Barr and a dozen of her friends—boys and girls, black and white—sat for a photograph on a porch in Evanston, Illinois. Barr’s book, both history and ethnography, emerges from her thinking about this photograph and its deep background. Using government documents, newspaper articles, and census data, Barr provides a history of Evanston with a particular emphasis on its neighborhoods, its schools, and its families. Barr also tracked down all of the living people in her photograph and interviewed them about their experiences in Evanston and beyond. Ultimately, Barr comes to better understand the stories—and the lies—people tell about their communities, as well as the ways that inequality begets inequality, both in a historical sense and in the daily lives of her far-flung friends.