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The Illinois State Historical Society has, for 121 winters, celebrated each new year with the promise of greater perspective, greater diversity, and the very best scholarship about our Prairie State’s past. We could not dream of a future without you, our members, making this journey with us. If you have not renewed your membership, please do so today. We need you.

This issue celebrates many fascinating aspects of our history, and our writers, board, and staff would love to know what you think of our efforts. Please send your email comments to executivedirector@historyillinois.org, and, with your permission, we will publish them in Illinois Heritage.

Thank you for your support, your perseverance during the late pandemic, and for your fortitude in these challenging times. Spring is coming, bringing the promise of unimaginable joy. Share your joy. Share your Heritage.

The Summer 2020 issue of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society is printed. The Journal, the scholarly publication of the ISHS, is published quarterly and is a benefit of membership in the Illinois State Historical Society. Each issue includes articles, essays, book reviews, and documents about history, literature, art technology, law, and other subjects related to Illinois and the Midwest. Click on our Membership tab in the Menu Bar for membership options and information. Click on the “Read More” button for a list of articles and reviews included in this issue.  

The January-February 2018, issue of Illinois Heritage invites its readers to celebrate the state’s bicentennial.  Adventures around the Prairie State take us on a veritable road trip around the state without leaving our hearth.  Art and literature are celebrated with a look a Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Carl and Mark Van
Doren and the art of Irma Rene Koen. Traveling the state with authors Stephen Leonard and Keith Sculle will surely jog a reader’s memory of their own trips.  Finally, be sure not to miss our state’s bicentennial time travel in the first installment of “Illinois in Time.” 

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.