Inside the Collection is a video series that invites you into the Chicago History Museum’s storage spaces to explore unusual, interesting artifacts from our vast collection. In this installment, senior collection manager Britta Keller Arendt discusses three artifacts related to Elmer Ellsworth, a law clerk to Abraham Lincoln who became a martyr at the onset More
Project archivist Adam Melville worked with CHM archivist Julie Wroblewski as part of his graduate school practicum. In this blog post, he describes how he processed one of our largest acquisitions in recent history. This summer, I received the exciting but daunting opportunity to process the papers of US congressman Sidney R. Yates—a 262-linear-foot collection More
Get to know Chicago cultural maven Lois Weisberg with the contents of her collection in our Research Center. Small only in stature, Lois Weisberg was a big presence in Chicago’s civic and cultural life for seven decades. Everything about her seemed larger than life, including a circle of friends that ran the gamut from comedian More
Inside the Collection is a video series that invites you into the Chicago History Museum’s storage spaces to explore unusual, interesting artifacts from our vast collection. In this installment, senior collection manager Britta Keller Arendt and summer intern Amy Sparks discuss an original traffic controller switch, c. 1926, from Chicago’s Loop. The city used this More
CHM collections volunteer Robert Blythe details the history and contents of the Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Illinois records in our Research Center. During the Civil War, some 2.7 million men served in Union blue from 1861 to 1865. To preserve their bonds of comradeship and ensure that veterans and their families received More