This past summer, CHM collections intern Elise O’Neil assisted with the ongoing inventory of the Decorative and Industrial Arts collection. In this blog post, O’Neil writes about the legacies that objects reflect, depending on who owned them. As a lifelong history nerd, working at the Chicago History Museum as a collections intern this summer and doing More
In this blog post, CHM curatorial intern Brigid Kennedy recounts the life of labor organizer Lucy Parsons. The details of Lucy Parsons’s early life in Texas are murky, and she herself provided different accounts of her youth and heritage. Her race was the subject of public debate, but she claimed only Mexican and Muscogee Creek More
Collections volunteer Robert Blythe writes about Chicagoan Paul King Jr., a building contractor and social justice advocate, fifty years after the Coalition of United Community Action led a demonstration on July 22, 1969, demanding that building trade unions provide on-the-job trainee positions for minority groups. Many Chicagoans were taken aback in July 1969 when two hundred More
Project archivist Rebekah McFarland writes about her experience processing the Thing magazine records, which will be available for public access at the CHM Research Center in May. When Robert Ford, Trent Adkins, and Lawrence Warren founded Thing in 1989, they did so to fill a void in the publishing world. In a 1994 interview More
Streamlined design found a welcome home in American kitchens. In the mid-1930s, as the economy began to improve, consumers looked to update their homes. Then as now, most people began with their kitchens, and Chicago supplied the market with a multitude of streamlined products. At the top of the list stood a group of Sunbeam More