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The Spring 2022 issue of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society is now available. 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. Visit our Membership page for membership options and information. Click on the “Read More” button to see a list of articles and reviews included in this issue.

The presence of humans in the Illinois Country goes back at least 12,000 years, and some archaeologists would push that envelope even further into the past. We find footprints of prehistoric peoples all over the landscape of the Prairie State, and we have ample evidence of their physical presence in cultural artifacts found in museums and historical society collections from Galena to Golconda, Chicago to Cairo. In this issue of Illinois Heritage, our goal is to shine a spotlight on the people who called Illinois home before Europeans arrived on America’s shores.

We also profile southern Illinois historian John Allen and visit the sites of three new historical markers around the state.

Be safe, share your Heritage, and, if you are able, make a donation to the Society in support of our annual appeal. As always, thanks for your membership in the ISHS. With your help, we do great deeds.

November’s ISHS History Happy Hour program is entitled Native Americans of the Illinois Country and is presented by Mark Walczynski. Mark is the Park Historian for the Starved Rock Foundation located at Starved Rock State Park, Utica, Illinois. Mark’s studies focus on the Franco-Amerindian history of the Western Great Lakes and the Illinois Country during the last 40 years of the 1600s. He is also an affiliate with the Illinois Archaeological Survey.

Volume 110, No. 2 of the Journal opens with three studies that about events that dramatically shaped the state’s nearly two hundred year history. In "Pocahontas, Uleleh, and Hononegah: The Archetype of the American Indian Princess," Dan Blumlo explores the trope of the Indian Princess–who intervenes at a crucial moment to save a white man from certain death at the hands of savage Indians–evolved and became central to nineteenth and twentieth century conceptions of American nationalism.

In "Jim Crow Comes to Central Illinois: Racial Segregation in the Twentieth Century Bloomington-Normal," Mark Wyman and John W. Muirhead review the persistence of racial segregation in Illinois and the struggles of blacks and sympathetic whites to combat it.

In our final article, "The Decline of Decatur," longtime Illinois historian Roger Biles presents a timely account of what we today call globalization, and why its history matters so much to residents of countless Rustbelt cities like Decatur.