Here are works about people and events from the history of Illinois published in virtually every publication I ever wrote for—history-related magazine features, opinion pieces, book reviews, a government report or two, pamphlets, excerpts from works in progress, and a never-used book preface that explains how I came to be interested in Illinois history. The pieces take in everything from the Woodland period until the 1960s or so, and their topics include frontier Illinois, architectural antiques, ecosystem change, culture high and low, social antagonisms—pretty much everything. 

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Please note that articles about Abraham Lincoln appear on the Lincoln page. Click here for more information and excerpts from my book-length history of mid-Illinois, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves. For articles about historic preservation, see Architecture. For pieces about Springfield history, click here.

 

I was surprised, reviewing 40 years of work, to realize how much of it is about Illinois history, broadly defined. I knew the archive was crammed with stuff about Lincoln—every Springfield writer must take up Lincoln as a subject—and I always tried to find markets for reviews of Illinois history books that I was reading for other projects.  What struck me was how many of my non-history pieces—on government operations, child welfare, on the likely return of cougars to Illinois—have an historical dimension.

 

Over and over in Illinois, the history of each human occupation of a region has been mostly obliterated by its successor, leaving the stories of their regional forbears a mystery. The Euro-Americans knew no more about the Kickapoo than they knew about the ancient tribes of Israel—indeed, some thought Illinois’s ancient Indians had been one of those tribes—but Native American peoples had lost track of the region’s pre-white history too. Curators of the Under the Prairie Museum in Elkhart reminded visitors that a stone ax on display, which was found on the nearby Pine Ridge Farm, “would have seemed as strange to a Kickapoo Indian in 1800 as it does to us today.” Most of the works linked here were merely attempts to explain that strangeness, to satisfy my own curiosity about how things became the way they are, which I assumed other people share.

 

Historic preservationists use a 50-year rule to demark which buildings and other sites can be officially considered “historic.” In a very few years my own work will be old enough to qualify as historical. Indeed one of my hopes for this archives (stated on the Home page) is to make that work available to historians seeking raw material for new accounts of modern Illinois.

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For articles about Chicago history, see here.

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