Chicago

Chicago is built on a foundation of meat and railroads and steel, but its identity long ago stretched past manufacturing. A city of opportunity from the get-go, it continues to lure new residents from around the world, and from across a region rocked by recession and deindustrialization. But the problems that plague the Belt don’t disappear once you get past Gary. In fact, they’re often amplified. Chicago’s glittering downtown towers stand in sharp contrast to the struggling south and west sides. A city defined by movement that’s the anchor of the Midwest, bound to its neighbors by a shared ecosystem and economy, Chicago’s complicated – both of the Belt and beyond it. Which makes it a perfect subject for a book.

History of Hyde Park neighborhood through documentation of notable residences.

Guide to being carless in Chicago

Guide to Chicago that goes deeper than the usual tourist's guidebook

A Chicago beat cop documents best 24-hour meals under $10 to be had in Chicago.

From back cover: "John Conroy sits down with torturers from several nations and comes to understand their motivations."

Using the South Side of Chicago as a microcosm, Spear analyzes the creation and circumstances that caused the 'Negro' 'ghetto' to form the way that it did. From back cover 'Allan Spear explores here the history of a major Negro community during a crucial thirty-year period when a relatively fluid pattern of race relations gave way to a rigid system of segregation and discrimination'.

History of the Dil Pickle Club (1920s) as told in a series of essays by (mostly) former members

Inside MAKE #16, “ARCHIVE,” you will find stories, poems, essays, conversations and visual art oriented around concepts of memory, preservation, photo negatives and negative hands, disappearing/reappearing faces, letters sent and never received, lost and recovered traces; in short, the archive (or its simulacrum). One is reminded of Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever”: “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe [rule, government, beginning, origin, first place]. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.” Archives are assembled to remember a first place, an origin site that houses historical codes and modes of order, but they are also, weirdly, selective mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that strategically forget, reassemble or reorder the objects of memory. An archive remembers inasmuch as it forgets, stores away (for later), blurs, and obscures. The archive you will encounter in these pages is one that plays with these notions, and we hope you will enjoy it.

This guidebook, written by Mariame Kaba and Essence McDowell, features a number of Black women who contributed to the development of Chicago from the mid-19th century to today. It tells a story of Black women activists, educators and artists who lived and worked on Chicago’s South Side by taking readers on a tour of relevant landmarks and locations.