Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Spring 2015

Volume 108, Number 1

The present issue of the Journal takes us from the colorful din of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to the bucolic downstate coal belt. In “Types and Beauties: Evaluating and Exoticizing Women on the Midway Plaissance at the 1893 Columbian Exposition,” Rachel Boyle traces the intersection of racial and gendered discourses in the representations of foreign women published in souvenir books commemorating the World’s Fair. Written by and for white American males, popular souvenir books such as Midway Types offered photographic and textual documentation of the staged foreign scenes that attracted male fairgoers on the Midway Plaissance.

Lisa Cushing Davis’s fascinating article, “Hegemony and Resistance at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Simon Pokagon and The Red Man’s Rebuke” situates a key moment at the Exposition—Chicago Day—in the ironic and often tragic history of nineteenth-century United States Indian policy. That story, of course, was then and is still now integral to the history of the city’s birth and subsequent rise. The central tension between assimilation and resistance for native peoples in the late nineteenth century is richly illuminated in the person of Simon Pokagon, leader of the Potawatomi.

In “Strip Coal Mining and Reclamation in Fulton County, Illinois: An Environmental History,” Greg Hall shifts the study of twentieth-century Illinois coal mining into the growing field of environmental history. Pushing beyond categories employed by social, economic and labor historians, Hall uses Fulton County as a case study in what an environmental history of Illinois coal mining might look like.

Articles

“Types and Beauties: Evaluating and Exoticizing Women on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Columbian Exposition”
Rachel Boyle

“Hegemony and Resistance at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Simon Pokagon and The Red Man’s Rebuke “
Lisa Cushing Davis

“Strip Coal Mining and Reclamation in Fulton County, Illinois: An Environmental History”
Greg Hall

Featured Review

American Railroads: Decline and Renaissance in the Twentieth Century. By Robert E. Gallamore and John R. Meyer
Rock Island Requiem: The Collapse of a Mighty Fine Line. By Gregory L. Schneider.
Reviewed by H. Roger Grant

Book Reviews

Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War. By Colin Edward Woodward.
Reviewed by Robert Tracey McKenzie

Writing the Gettysburg Address. By Martin P. Johnson.
Reviewed by Brian Dirck

We Called Him Rabbi Abraham: Lincoln and American Jewry - A Documentary History. Ed. By Gary Phillip Zola.
Reviewed by Erika Perez

Cover

“Rebecca Meise Alithensii (Jewess).” From the souvenir book, Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance; A Collection of Photographs of Individual Types of Various Nations from All Parts of the World Who Represented, in the Department of Ethnology, the Manners, Customs, Dress, Religions, Music and Other Distinctive Traits and Peculiarities of Their Race (St. Louis: N.D. Thompson Pub. Co., 1894). Courtesy Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.