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This book is a history of the University of Chicago, from its first founding in 1857 through its re-founding in 1890 till today. It presents the story of the emergence and growth of a complex academic community, particularly the College, focusing on the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the resources and conditions that have enabled the University to sustain itself. It focuses on two issues particular to undergraduate liberal arts colleges set within larger research universities. First, while the University’s relationship to the undergraduate College has been unpredictable, that relationship has had enormous influence over the identity and fiscal health of the larger institution. Second, Chicago’s history reveals a unique chronological flow within the story of American higher education, in that its “Golden Age” of fiscal bounty and rising ambitions came before 1945. Yet its successes proved fragile precisely because Chicago found itself on a different demographic trajectory than its peers, characterized by a collapse of undergraduate enrolment in the 1950s that profoundly disadvantaged the welfare of the University in the next forty years. These two themes run through an unusually complicated and controversial history, which has been shrouded at many points by layers of myth and hearsay. It is the contention of this book that one can most accurately uncover such a university history by addressing questions to sources that can be authenticated and compared with other sources.

This book unpacks the urban development process, identifying the players and processes that contribute to periodic construction booms. Debunking the notion that booms occur to accommodate growth or are propelled by a natural process of creative destruction, it develops novel theories about how real estate markets are “performed” through historically and locally-specific professional practices. The book focuses on three main causes of overbuilding in commercial real estate: financial instruments and regulatory changes that boost liquidity in global capital markets; the practices of local intermediaries that help construct demand for new assets; and local government policies that provide incentives for development while simultaneously removing the detritus from earlier waves of expansion. To illustrate the interplay between these dynamics, the book documents the case of Chicago's downtown during the “Millennial Boom,” roughly 1998 through 2008. Relying on market data and interviews, it shows how the city's recovery from the recession of the early 2000s was a relatively jobless one and did not upend the secular trend of population loss. Moreover, modest innovations in building technology did not suddenly afflict older buildings with a case of mass obsolescence. This period of frenzied commercial construction was instead a response to the availability of public and private finance validated by the brokered and subsidized preferences of existing occupants for more modern premises. The book ends with policy proposals to slow capital circulation and alter the professional practices associated with speculative overbuilding.

This book examines how various black Chicagoans used public history to engage with civil rights struggles. Numerous efforts to promote and teach this history demonstrated how dissident left-wing political currents from previous decades remained relevant to a vibrant and ideologically diffuse African American public sphere despite widespread Cold War dispersions, white-supremacist reactions, and anti-Communist repressions. The argument in this book proceeds by demonstrating how public-history projects strategically coalesced around a series of connected pedagogical endeavors. These endeavors included the work of schoolteachers on Chicago’s South Side who tried to advance curriculum reforms through World War II and afterwards; the activities of important cultural workers, such as Margaret T. G. Burroughs and Charles Burroughs, who politicized urban space and fought for greater recognition of black history in the public sphere through the advancement of their vision for a museum; and the Afro-American Heritage Association, which expressed a politics of black left nationalism that engaged with radical politics through black public-history labors. Collectively, these projects expressed important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labors that engaged closely with the rapidly shifting terrains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights and international anticolonialisms. Ultimately, this book offers a social history about how black left-wing cultural work in public history and similar forms of knowledge production were at the intersections of political realities and lived experience in U.S. urban life.

This book links the state constitutions of Illinois to Abraham Lincoln’s legacy amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Beginning with Euro-American settlement in the region that would become Illinois, the narrative details the various nations that governed the territory and the issues that concerned its population, from degrees of authoritarian rule to the status of indentured servants and black and Native slaves. As the territory came under U.S. control through the Northwest Ordinance, its sparse population held southern attitudes toward government and slavery. Through an enabling act in 1818, the northern border of Illinois Territory was set sixty miles north of the southern tip of Lake Michigan, encompassing what would eventually become the economic powerhouse of Chicago. Analysis of the four nineteenth-century state constitutional conventions (1818, 1847, 1862, 1869) summarizes essential issues for Illinois’s citizens, from the balance of governmental powers to the civil rights of African Americans, from squabbles over internal improvements like canals and railroads to geographical splits between rural and urban, Yankee and southern. This history and analysis shows that the enabling act that extended the Illinois border north also enabled the growth of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln’s election as president, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution that altered the nation’s history.

In the late nineteenth century, progressive reformers recoiled at the prospect of the justice system punishing children as adults. Advocating that children’s inherent innocence warranted fundamentally different treatment, reformers founded the nation’s first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Yet amid an influx of new African American arrivals to the city during the Great Migration, notions of inherent childhood innocence and juvenile justice were circumscribed by race. In documenting how blackness became a marker of criminality that overrode the potential protections the status of “child” could have bestowed, Tera Eva Agyepong shows the entanglements between race and the state’s transition to a more punitive form of juvenile justice.