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History Reference Center
Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
The Dixie Highway, once a main thoroughfare from Chicago to Miami, was part of an improved network of roads traversing the landscape of 10 states. A product of the Good Roads Movement of the early 20th century, construction on the highway in Illinois took place from 1916 to 1921. When completed in 1921, the Dixie Highway was the longest continuous paved road in the state. It ran through parts of Cook, Will, Kankakee, Iroquois, and Vermilion Counties,
...Chicago is known throughout the world for its architecture. Although many people are familiar with the city's skyscrapers and public buildings, they often overlook or are unaware of Chicago's mansions that are located throughout the city. These mansions represent Chicago's past and its future, and it can even be said that they are the very embodiment of Chicago and its architecture. These fashionable residences were built to make a statement, and
...McHenry County, Illinois, is a picture-perfect farming community in the Heartland of Midwestern America. For nearly two centuries, a portion of the nation's food supply has come from this fertile land near the Fox River, and it has played a key role in the history of Chicago and the United States. Through the medium of historic photographs, this book captures the evolution of the people of McHenry County, from the mid-1800s to the second half of
...Prairie Avenue evolved into Chicago's most exclusive residential street during the last three decades of the 19th century.
Chicago's wealthiest citizens—Marshall Field, Philip Armour, and George Pullman—were soon joined by dozens of Chicago's business, social, and civic leaders, establishing a neighborhood that the Chicago Herald proclaimed a cluster of millionaires not to be matched for numbers anywhere else in the
...15) Chicago blues
Blues was once described as the devil's music. It eventually became some of the most beloved American music that was embraced by a global audience. Originating in African American communities in the South in the late 1800s, it was inspired by gospel and spiritual music sung by field hands and sharecroppers who worked on plantations. During the Great Migration from the early 1900s to the mid-1970s, many African Americans moved north for a better
...North Aurora: 1834-1940 is a quintessential study of what happened when settlers arrived in the Midwest in the 1830s. The village's location on the Fox River provided plentiful trees and waterpower for sawmills. Soon other mills, smelting works, a packing plant, a door-sash-blind factory, and a creamery all came to town. The village's railroad enabled its Boswell Cheese Factory to ship cream cheese to England in 1877. By 1922, North Aurora had
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