(the following is cross-posted from the Cemetery Mixtape page, which also includes a podcast!) Every year, thousands of people walk past the landmark Getty tomb in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery to admire the architecture. Designed by Louis Sullivan, it’s perhaps the most perfect example of Sullivan’s style. Almost no one who sees it realizes that inside…
Author: adam
author / historian who does all kinds of neat stuff. I have about 20 books out and I've been running historical tours and ghost tours in Chicago since 2005.
Henry Rhines: The Chicago Slave-Catcher
The career of Henry Rhines, an early Chicago villain.
Uncollected Frederick Douglass Speech Discovered
I love research. I feel like Indiana Jones when I’m digging around in a box crumbling paperwork at the legal archives. And, though it’s a lot easier to search old newspapers that have been digitized, it’s more of an adventure to browse the microfilm reels. For one thing, it’s the closest you can get to…
Was John Stone Chicago’s First Serial Killer? (podcast)
John Stone was the first murderer hanged in Chicago – and suggested the murder wasn’t his first. An “oral history” of his Chicago crime.
Jefferson Davis in Chicago
While researching an upcoming article, I noticed something that struck me as odd: a first-hand account of Jefferson Davis coming to Chicago in 1829. I had never heard of the future Confederate president being in the area. That year, then-Lt. Davis had been stationed at Fort Winnebago, near what is now Portage, Wisconsin, and apparently…
Jo Anderson: The Mysterious Slave of Cyrus McCormick
Investigating the story of Joe Anderson, the slave whom some say deserves credit for inventing McCormick’s reaper.
“Brutality of a Policeman.”
Stories of police brutality in Chicago aren’t new
Burnham’s “Make No Little Plans” Quote: Apocryphal No More!
Locating and reprinting the original speech in which Daniel Burnham told city planners to “make no little plans.” Reprinted for the first time since 1910!