Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves
Odds & ends
Illinois past and present, as seen by James Krohe Jr.
The Corn Latitudes
Illinois life
A grab bag of pieces from profiles to perorations about day-to-day life in Illinois and about being Illinoisan. Most are exasperated and sardonic in tone—not commentaries, exactly, and not exactly humor pieces either, although comment and humor figure in a lot of them.
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Illinois—the land of brown-water rafting
"Prejudices" Illinois Times June 30, 1983
This Old Town Is Going to the Dogs
In Oak Park, even the dogs have agendas
Wednesday Journal July 29, 1992
A Civic Fussbudget Meets His Match in Oak Park's Mean Streets
Suburban tidiness meets urban realities
Wednesday Journal June 24, 1992
Return of the Bastard Toadflax
Putting the prairie back into the Prairie State
Illinois Issues April 1996
Wilbur Zelinsky—yes, him—on America’s vernacular regions
"Prejudices" Illinois Times September 2, 1981
Illinois State Fair
State fair week reminds me again why I hate a parade
"Prejudices" Illinois Times August 20, 1987
Fair Deal
Turning the state fair into an expo of real rural life
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times September 8, 2016
Charlie Boon, Logger, of Goofy Ridge
A tinkering entrepreneur in the old Illinois style
Illinois Times November 24, 1978
In which Springfield’s canned “chillis” pass a test
"Prejudices" Illinois Times December 2, 1982
House Hunting
Meditations on the suburban dream, Chicago-style
Reader March 29, 1991
Backward countryside, forward-looking state
“Prejudices” Illinois Times April 19, 1990
The world through the eyes of Farm Week
“Prejudices” Illinois Times February 3, 1983
The fishy cousin to the gnu and the aardvark
“Prejudices” Illinois Times July 21, 1978
Springfield tries to have fun. It wasn’t pretty
“Prejudices” Illinois Times July 10, 1981
Ill at ease in Illinois’s wide open spaces
“Prejudices” Illinois Times November 16, 1979
Too many Illinoisans don’t know how to behave on the road
“Dyspepsiana” Illinois Times August 21, 2014
Illinois once was French—not that you’d notice
“Prejudices” Illinois Times May 21, 1992
Family feud: Chicago vs. Downstate
Chicagoland, Chicagoland
The rise of the Chicago city-state
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times March 17, 2011
Making Noises in Civic Class
Splitting Cook County from Illinois is an old bad idea
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times December 15, 2011
Jim Edgar tries to bridge the Chicago-Downstate divide
“Dyspepsiana” Illinois Times July 5, 2012
Taking the anthropological view in Chicago
“Prejudices” Illinois Times May 3, 1990
It's Not the Heat, It's the Corn
Are row crops making summers unbearable?
“Dyspepsiana” Illinois Times July 12, 2011
Libertarians limber up their guns along the Illinois
“Prejudices” Illinois Times January 2, 1981
The demise of the Illinois countryside
“Prejudices” Illinois Times August 10, 1979
Several games are played on the women's tour
“Prejudices” Illinois Times September 10, 1981
Organized fun in Springfield. In Springfield?
“Prejudices” Illinois Times August 15, 1980
A Cass County town goes dry; the world notices
“Prejudices” Illinois Times April 22, 1977
God Lets Bob Ingersoll Off
The legend of the statehouse cornerstone
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times January 16, 2014
Honest, Officer, I Didn’t See It Coming
How to make Illinois drivers better drivers
“Dyspepsiana” Illinois Times November 26, 2014
Even Illinois golf courses are not up to par
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times June 8, 2017
Illinois needs a new state song for a new era
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times July 7, 2016
Mis-say It Loud, Mis-Say It Proud
Save Illinois? We can’t even pronounce it
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times April 21, 2016
Seeking the scenic in central Illinois
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times August 19, 2010
Finding ourselves gets harder all the time
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times September 25, 2014
No Stickers
Seeing the universe in the sand burr
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times May 2, 2011
Illinois Firsts, Mosts, and Onlys
Dubious distinctions and proud boasts
See Illinois (unpublished) 2008
Illinois roads are not demanding. Neither are its driving laws.
“Prejudices” Illinois Times March 7, 1980
Craig Findley of the Gazette-Times
Trying to make a good country weekly very good
Illinois Times August 12, 1977
Downstaters are patriotic. Who knew?
“Prejudices” Illinois Times January 4, 1980
Delightful, De-lovely, Decatur
A Springfield looks down his nose and sees Decatur
“Prejudices” Illinois Times November 3, 1978
Springfield turns out to cheer itself on the Fourth
“Prejudices” Illinois Times July 14, 1978
Planting new questions about Illinois ag
“Prejudices” Illinois Times April 12, 1984
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SITES
OF
INTEREST
Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.
One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.
See Home Page/Learn/
Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.
The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.
The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.
A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.
Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois
Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."
Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards, posters, and videos.
The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.
“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered."
Illinois Labor History Society
The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like.
Illinois Migration History 1850-2017
The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly.
An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than
2,000 words.)
BOOKS
OF INTEREST
Southern Illinois University Press 2017
A work of solid history, entertainingly told.
Michael Burlingame,
author of Abraham
Lincoln: A Life
One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.
Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018
A lively and engaging study . . . an enthralling narrative.
James Edstrom
The Annals of Iowa
A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians
as well as local historians generally.
John Hoffman
Journal of Illinois HIstory
A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.
Harold Henderson
Midwestern Microhistory
A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.
Greg Hall
Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society
Click here
to buy the book
Southern Illinois University Press
SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.
The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more. Of particular note are its Prairie State Books, quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.
The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to
Vivian Maier.
Northern Illinois University Press
The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.
Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order
by book title.
Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.
