Known today as a Democratic Party stronghold, Chicago has ties to the Grand Old Party dating to Abraham Lincoln’s times. One twentieth-century GOP stalwart was Bertha Baur, who long made her home at 1511 Astor Street in the Gold Coast. National Republican Committeewoman for Illinois from 1928 to 1952, Mrs. Baur had a groundbreaking career 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 shows us the skin of the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. This artifact came to More
To cap off Black History Month, CHM cataloging and metadata librarian Gretchen Neidhardt writes about her search for the voices of African American servicemen in our archives. While in the process of digitizing the last of our paper card catalog for 6,000 small manuscript collections, I noticed that several items mentioned “Negro Troops.” (Our card More
Collections volunteer Robert Blythe writes about photographer Raeburn Flerlage, who captured the blues and folk scenes in 1960s Chicago. If you’re a fan of American roots music, then the Chicago History Museum’s Raeburn Flerlage collection is a must-see. Ray, as he was known, spent much of the 1960s taking candid photographs in Chicago’s premier blues More
CHM archives intern Ashley Clark worked with archivist Julie Wroblewski to process the papers of John A. McDermott, a local leader in race relations and urban affairs from the 1960s into the 1990s. This past fall, I had the opportunity to process the John A. McDermott papers at the Chicago History Museum. I had processed More