Journal

We open 2019 with three articles addressing murder, politics, and ethnoreligious identity in Illinois. In "Untouchable: Joseph Smith's Use of the Law as a Catalyst for Assassination," Alex Smith offers a fine-grained analysis of the Mormon prophet's understanding- and misunderstanding- of key legal concepts leading up to his murder at a Carthage, Illinois jail in 1844. 

Like the histroy of Joseph Smith and anti-mormonism, antislavery politics has generated a rich and variegated historiography. In "Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Men: The Origins of the Republican Party in DuPage County, Illinois," Stephen Buck synthesizes many of the widely accepted explanations for the Republican Party's emergence in the 1850s, including the powerful ideal of free-soil in the trans-Mississippi West; opposition to the political clout of the "Slave Power" nationally; and genuine moral committments to the abolition of Slavery. 

Always a city of immigrants, Chicago has rightfully served as a key focus for a wide-ranging body of scholarship on the immigrant experience in America. Oddly, however, the French, the first Europeans to see and settle the area, have largely faded from view in histories of immigrant Chicago. Daniel Snow sheds much needed light on the French-American experience in the Windy City in "Of Three Nations: Devotion and Community in French-American Chicago, 1850-1950."

Volume 110, No. 1 of the Journal opens with three studies of post–World War II Illinois history. In “‘Names and Appearances are often Indeterminate:’ Quandaries over Identifying Jews in Chicago, 1953–1961,” Kelly King-O’Brien examines the conversations between Chicago-based Jewish agencies, President Eisenhower’s Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC), and private employers accused of discriminatory practices. 

Ann Durkin Keating treats another facet of civic life that shaped the postwar liberal order in “‘Behind the Suburban Curtain:’ The Campaign for Open Occupancy in Naperville.” In the late 1960s the Civil Rights Movement, having secured historic victories over de jure segregation in the South, set its sights on the much harder problem of de facto segregation in the North’s metropolitan areas.

In our final article, “‘The Dwindling Legacy that is Food for Mice and Flames:’ Discovery and Preservation of Illinois Historic Newspapers through the Illinois Digital Newspaper Project, 2009–2015,” Marek Sroka and Tracy Nectoux trace the history of newspaper preservation in Illinois up through our current digital age.  

 

This issue offers three articles covering diverse aspects of Illinois' history. In "Illinois Germans and the Coming of the Civil War: Reshaping Ethnic Identity," Christina Bearden-White uses German-language sources to examine the complex issue of German identity in the Prairie State during the mid-nineteenth century.

Ian Rocksborough-Smith's article, "'I had gone in there thinking I was going to be a cultural worker': Richard Durham, Oscar Brown, Jr. and the United Packinghouse Workers Association in Chicago," presents a fascinating analysis of the Cold War-era careers of Oscar Brown, Jr. and Richard Durham, two prominent Chicago-based African American political activists.

Finally, Michael Sublett's "Downstate: Illinois' Peripheral Other," presents the etymology of that well-known Prairie State term. Employing the categories of core and periphery, which rose to prominence in social science and historical writing during the 1970s, Sublett traces the evolution and application of the downstate moniker.