Why does the University of Illinois campus at Urbana-Champaign look as it does today? Drawing on a wealth of research and featuring more than one hundred color photographs, An Illini Place provides an engrossing and beautiful answer to that question. Lex Tate and John Franch trace the story of the university's evolution through its buildings. Oral histories, official reports, dedication programs, and developmental plans both practical and quixotic inform the story. The authors als...

Company town: The very phrase sounds un-American. Yet company towns are the essence of America. Hershey bars, Corning glassware, Kohler bathroom fixtures, Maytag washers, Spam -- each is the signature product of a company town in which one business, for better or worse, exercises a grip over the population. In The Company Town, Hardy Green, who has covered American business for over a decade, offers a compelling analysis of the emergence of these communities and their role in shap...

“A handy guidebook that profiles a building per page, with a drawing and vital statistics on most of Chicago’s major historic and modern buildings.”—Chicago TribuneUpdated and expanded to chart the changing urban landscape of Chicago--as well as to incorporate a section on Chicago’s campus architecture, including works by Rem Koolhaas at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Frank Lloyd Wright at the University of Chicago--the second edition of this popular handbook is ...

Since their inception with New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition in the mid-nineteenth century, world's fairs have introduced Americans to “exotic” pleasures such as belly dancing and the Ferris Wheel; pathbreaking technologies such as telephones and X rays; and futuristic architectural, landscaping, and transportation schemes. Billed by their promoters as “encyclopedias of civilization,” the expositions impressed tens of millions of fairgoers with model environments and utopian visions.

The rich heritage of descendants of English, Dutch, and German settlers in the Hunterdon County population centers of Clinton, Flemington, and Lambertville is presented here. Life among the rolling hills of northwest New Jersey and in the three small towns that became centers of that area's population has been faithfully recorded by residents since the Civil War, capturing the rural character of their landscape.

American art museums flourished in the late twentieth century, and the impresario leading much of this growth was J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, from 1969 to 1992. Along with S. Dillon Ripley, who served as Smithsonian secretary for much of this time, Brown reinvented the museum experience in ways that had important consequences for the cultural life of Washington and its visitors as well as for American museums in general. In Capital Cultur...

When preserving our history, what do we choose to value, why, and who decides?Honorable Mention for the National Council on Public History Book Award of the National Council on Public HistoryIn 1994, when the National Air and Space Museum announced plans to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 sent to destroy Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the ensuing political uproar caught the museum's parent Smithsonian Institution entirely unprepared. As the largest...

Waukegan, Illinois has a long history, with a rich and varied heritage. Countless individuals, businesses, and organizations have contributed to that heritage, and continue today to contribute to the legacy of this community. One of Waukegan's most notable citizens was Jack Benny. Throughout his long career he regularly cited his hometown and its influence on him, and he often contributed to the city with his many appearances. But he wasn't the only person to bring fame to Waukegan. Edward...

This "fascinating, engaging" history of St. Louis's monument to American expansion reveals a story of greed, discrimination, and community displacement (NextSTL.com).Rising to a triumphant height of 630 feet, the Gateway Arch is one of the world's most widely recognized structures and attracts millions of tourists to St. Louis every year. Envisioned in 1947 but not completed until the mid-1960s, its story is one of innovation and greed; civic pride and backroom dea...

The Druid Hills neighborhood is characterized by rolling hills, magnificent trees and shrubs and gorgeous, expansive houses. Its Ponce de Leon corridor bears the imprint of the founder of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted. The brainchild of Joel Hurt, the neighborhood was brought to fruition by some of Atlanta's most prominent businessmen, including Asa Candler, founder of Coca-Cola. It was these movers and shakers of the city who lived in the neighborhood during the e...

The first settlers came to the Brockport area soon after 1800. Located some twenty miles west of Rochester, the towns of Sweden and Clarkson, the village of Brockport, and a college were organized between 1814 and 1835. The Erie Canal, farm implement manufacturing, and higher education fostered their growth and prosperity in the mid-1800s. At Brockport, the United States became a continental nation, the Industrial Revolution came to agriculture, and popular literature came to American wome...

Step back to the day when a visit to the gas station meant service with a smile, a wash of the windshield, and the cheerful question, "Fill 'er up?" Since their unremarkable beginnings as cheap shacks and curbside pumps at the dawn of the automobile age, gas stations have taken many forms and worn many guises: castles, cottages and teepees, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne, clad with wood, stucco, or gleaming porcelain in seemingly infinite variety.The companion volume to the Wiscon...