Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves
Odds & ends
Illinois past and present, as seen by James Krohe Jr.
The Corn Latitudes
Pet pieces
Here you will find a collection of my favorite pieces. Some are here because I thought them well-reported, some because they were well-written, some because I thought they were funny. It is not a "best of” list exactly (although quality is a criterion), and a list with so many pieces on it cannot be said to be select. They're just pieces on topics that I found interesting or important and that I thought worked in terms of my ambitions for them. Just about all of them appear under other topics elsewhere in this archives.
There are more explainers than I expected, and fewer polemics, on all sorts of topics. Not much in common, in short, although I did notice that just about every piece I did that involved actual reporting made the list. I should have gotten out and mingled much more than I did; when I bothered to get up from my desk, the results were usually good. Young reporters might take note.
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How one woman’s mistake may have doomed ERA
The Weekly (Champaign-Urbana) June 19, 1981
Touring Springfield As It Was 150 Years Ago
The Town Branch of Spring Creek, rediscovered
Illinois Times December 24, 1976
How I Became an Historian
Unpublished essay 2016
The Old State Capitol: Tarnished Jewel
Springfield squabbles over an inheritance
"Prejudices" Illinois Times January 30, 1981
Taking the anthropological view in Chicago
“Prejudices” Illinois Times May 3, 1990
The risks of asking strangers for directions
“Prejudices” Illinois Times September 7, 1989
The Young Man and the Suburb
Oak Park welcomes Hemingway back home, at last
Reader March 30, 1990
Charlie Boon, Logger, of Goofy Ridge
A tinkering entrepreneur in the old Illinois style
Illinois Times November 24, 1978
The Family Farmer: An Endangered Species?
A “typical” family farmer of central Illinois in the 1970s.
Across the Board September 1978
Craig Findley of the Gazette-Times
Trying to make a good country weekly very good
Illinois Times August 12, 1977
A Day in the Life of the Havana River Research Laboratory
Public science on the Illinois River
The Nature of Illinois Fall 1988
The devastation of Gulf fisheries by Illinois farm runoff
Illinois Issues July/August 2006
Nature and nativism in the prairie restoration movement
Illinois Issues July/August 2007
Illinois legislators get their cults confused
“Prejudices” Illinois Times June 15, 1979
Saving History from the Wrecking Ball
Richard Nickel and Louis Sullivan's legacy
Illinois Issues October 1986
The Natural History of an Unnatural Lake
Lake Springfield, this is your life
Illinois Times May 27, 1977
Local arts critics show courage under fire
“Prejudices” Illinois Times April 10, 1981
I look back at public school and see myself
“Prejudices” Illinois Times March 5, 1987
My Life as a Guide at the Lincoln Law Offices
Part barker, part sheep dog, part player piano
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times November 5, 2009
Kirk Dillard mixes his messages about family
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times June 13, 2013
Dragooning jurors to serve justice is unjust
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times January 30, 2014
If you liked Dan Walker, you’ll love Gov. Bruce Rauner
“Dyspepsiana” Illinois Times March 13, 2014
Why Springfield street improvements seldom were
“Prejudices” Illinois Times August 13, 1992
Public servants shouldn’t get servants’ wages
"Prejudices" Illinois Times February 5, 1991
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love LaRouche
Lunatics hijack a major party primary. Sound familiar?
“Prejudices” Illinois Times April 3, 1986
The world through the eyes of Farm Week
“Prejudices” Illinois Times February 3, 1983
Springfield’s “new” aldermanic government turns 30
“Dyspepsiana” Illinois Times January 26, 2017
Term limits are bad politics and worse government
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times September 26, 2013
Going On . . . and On
One writer struggles against prolixity, and loses
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times March 22, 2012
Flood of Memories
Reflections on Chicago’s Great Leak of 1992
Reader April 9, 1993
Taking the Christian out of Christianity
The YMCA picks up a new name but sells an old idea
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times August 12, 2010
No Stickers
Seeing the universe in the sand burr
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times May 2, 2011
Report from Illinois's Sand Country
Cactus? In mid-Illinois corn country? You bet.
Illinois Times November 10, 1978
Libertarians limber up their guns along the Illinois
“Prejudices” Illinois Times January 2, 1981
Carp Diem
What are the leaping fish trying to tell us?
"Dyspepsiana" Illinois Times August09, 2012
I Think Icon, I Think Icon, I Think Icon
The iconography of building decoration explained, sort of
Crain's Chicago Business April 5, 1993
Trading coal today for corn forever
“Prejudices” Illinois Times January 18, 1980
Illinoisans debate how to treat animals for food
"Prejudices" Illinois Times January 28, 1982
Would Ruin Chicago Ave. Character
Ruining the "park" in Oak Park
Wednesday Journal November 27, 1911
When does restoring become destroying?
"Prejudices" Illinois Times December 14, 1979
The seed that grew into a Lincoln Presidential library
“Prejudices” Illinois Times ca 1990
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SITES
OF
INTEREST
Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.
One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.
See Home Page/Learn/
Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.
The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.
The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.
A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.
Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois
Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."
Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards, posters, and videos.
The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.
“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered."
Illinois Labor History Society
The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like.
Illinois Migration History 1850-2017
The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly.
An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than
2,000 words.)
BOOKS
OF INTEREST
Southern Illinois University Press 2017
A work of solid history, entertainingly told.
Michael Burlingame,
author of Abraham
Lincoln: A Life
One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.
Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018
A lively and engaging study . . . an enthralling narrative.
James Edstrom
The Annals of Iowa
A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians
as well as local historians generally.
John Hoffman
Journal of Illinois HIstory
A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.
Harold Henderson
Midwestern Microhistory
A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.
Greg Hall
Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society
Click here
to buy the book
Southern Illinois University Press
SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.
The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more. Of particular note are its Prairie State Books, quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.
The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to
Vivian Maier.
Northern Illinois University Press
The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.
Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order
by book title.
Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.
